


how big the hourglass, how deep the sand

by Handful_of_Silence



Series: how deep the sand [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: After All This They Deserve a Little Cottage and a Spring Wedding, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Aziraphale (Good Omens), Determined Crowley, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Imprisonment, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Kidnapping, Life After the Apocalypse, M/M, Mutual Pining, Nobody Uses Their Words Properly, The South Downs Retirement Dream™, co-dependancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-14 02:36:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18043838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Handful_of_Silence/pseuds/Handful_of_Silence
Summary: After the Apocalypse, and with characteristic slowness, both Crowley and Aziraphale think there might be something they need to sit down and talk about.And then Aziraphale disappears.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Plot inspired by / based on Neil Gaiman's 'The Sandman', notably #1 (Preludes and Nocturnes). If you haven't already given this a go, it is 100% worth it :D

Crowley parks the Jeep thoughtlessly, and the music trickles away into a muted city-silence of distant chattering people and the occasional car alarm. Saturday has slipped into a cold evening dress, and when he pulls the latch and opens the door, the fug of the car's heating dissipates into an indifferent August evening. It feels as though it's just finished raining, and what with the light pollution, he barely sights any stars.

He realises, looking at the carefully swept pavement and the concierge smartly standing by the inner door, that he's brought them both back to his place. He blinks, before the memory trudges back that of course he has, Aziraphale doesn't have a home any more.

That, all this really, seems like a problem for tomorrow. Today has felt dreadfully long. This week has felt dreadfully long.

“Come on up,” he says, waving a tired hand in a beckon, and Aziraphale nods, gracelessly almost tripping over the pavement curb. He hadn't slept in the car, but he has the crumpled, sleep-heavy look of someone who has only just been jolted awake.

Crowley waves for the concierge to buzz them in. The smartly dressed man graciously seems to look at both men and know that small talk isn't required.

They don't say anything in the lift. Crowley stares at the blinking lights moving up the floors without taking it in. Aziraphale runs a hand through his frazzled hair, picks at some lint or soot clinging to the fibres of his jacket. They stand close, arms touching. There isn't really anything left to say at this point.

Aziraphale takes off his shoes, the weathered brogues spotted with mud and dust, and sets them neatly by the door while Crowley throws his house keys into a key bowl that possesses all the multi-faceted shininess of a dowager's diamond fortune. He slips off his own shoes and kicks them to one side, hearing them thump against the wall, and makes a sock-shod beeline for the kettle. He hears Aziraphale collect up the snake-skin shoes and place them by the door next to his own. Something about the idea makes him uncoil, just a little bit.

He pulls down two mugs from the cupboards. He doesn't ask how the angel takes it because he doesn't need to. He steadies his hands on the marble-counter top and thinks about nothing at all as he listens to the water heat up to boiling.

There's a soft tugging behind him.

“Your jacket is simply filthy, my dear.”

Crowley allows Aziraphale to pull the jacket from his shoulders. He's found a hanger somewhere, and he hangs it from the door handle, says a couple of mournful words about how it's probably un-salvageable, how he always thought that cut particularly fetching. There's the shush of fabric as the angel pulls off his own worse-for-wear jacket and drapes it over the back of a chair.

After the kettle boils, Crowley joins Aziraphale on the sofa, passing him the too-hot mug. He grabs the remote that looks like it could achieve Mach 1 and flicks a plethora of near-identical buttons until he finds some dull talk-show. Aziraphale makes some politically snide comment about whoever they have on talking, and Crowley smirks and reminds him to be merciful. Aziraphale scoffs. Crowley gives a small laugh and sips at his tea.

It's about ten minutes later that Aziraphale's gone quiet, and Crowley notices he's fallen asleep, leaning against Crowley's shoulder, his mouth slightly open and snoring softly. Crowley takes the drained mug from him, puts it down on the coffee table next to his own, flicks the TV onto standby.

He thinks of two pairs of shoes stood neatly next to each other by the door. A hand in his, uncompromising in the face of certain destruction. There's something new here, an axis tilted slightly or some final barriers fallen, something growing and stretching out from under the skin of the old days.

Aziraphale's weight is solid, comfortable against him, and Crowley feels right at home.

Tomorrow, he thinks to himself, stretching out, closing his eyes. Tomorrow.  
  


* * *

 

It is the Tuesday evening after the end of the world.

Crowley has dressed in clothes that could cut, and brings a well-sourced tipple around to Aziraphale's restored bookshop in the early evening. They've spent the last few days practically living in each other's pockets, and there's a lingering jitteriness there that hasn't quite dissipated. In fairness to them, not three days ago they thought the world was going to end. Today Aziraphale had clearly been itching to look over his books. He'd been vague about what exactly he wanted to do, something about getting some things in order, finally getting round to getting rid of some things, and he'd patted Crowley's arm as he handed him an overly-black hot drink that he'd fought the coffee machine to get and told him he'd be a few hours, nothing more.

Crowley didn't drink the coffee, but he'd appreciated the effort nonetheless.

The bookshop looks the same when Crowley arrives, but he's not sure he'd notice the difference. When he sits down in the back room, the chairs are certainly more forgiving on his back, and he nods his head approvingly as he gets himself settled, but then again that could be as much Adam's addition to the re-formulated bookshop as Aziraphale's hand at switching things up a bit.

Aziraphale is excitable, that's the first thing he notices. More so than usual. He swishes around the shop like he doesn't know where to put himself, moving things that look interchangeable in Crowley's unenlightened eyes. It's a good change from the slightly stressed look he's been carrying the past while. It softens the lines around his eyes, brightens his whole face from the inside.

Crowley finds himself smothering a small smile despite himself.

“I've been thinking, my dear,” he says airily. Aziraphale's airy sentence is clearly a giddiness that's trying too hard to be cool and uninvested, leaning against the conversational wall and obviously loitering. “That we should take a little holiday. Get away for a while. What would you say to a ride out into the countryside? A spot of tea and cake somewhere.”

He doesn't say how long they'll be gone. Crowley is slowly coming to terms with the fact that, from the radio silence they're being treated to, it's the first time in eleven years he doesn't have to do anything. Doesn't have to stay or go anywhere.

He smiles and shows off too many teeth, leans back.

“You've tempted me,” he drawls, successfully achieving a level of nonchalantness that Aziraphale could only dream of.

The angel beams.

“Excellent. I'll pack us a picnic,” he says happily. “A couple of sandwiches, a prosecco.”

Aziraphale has many strengths, but sandwich making is not one of them. His fillings are always well-chosen and tastefully bold, but he always massacres the bread with too much butter that's too cold to spread. Crowley doesn't mind so much. Aziraphale's 'couple of sandwiches' always include carefully selected cuts from the delicatessens, a handful of scotch eggs and dainty, flaky pastries, and what appears to be half the condiments aisle of Waitrose. He always knows how to choose the best chutneys for whatever wedge of cheese he's convinced they'll need, and the number will be numerous and far too much cheese for two beings to feasibly manage.

But Aziraphale is smiling, all the heaviness from the previous days lifted, and Crowley finds himself smiling too, getting soft in his old age.

He wonders, picking up the gentle thought from where it's tugging at his trouser leg, whether Aziraphale had always smiled at him like that. Thinks he's known the answer for a while now.

“You coming back to the flat?” he hints.

“I'm afraid I can't, dear boy,” Aziraphale says, and he looks genuinely mournful, putting his hand on Crowley's arm before he stands and starts clearing their glasses away. “I have a few things I simply must do before tomorrow. What do you say to nine o'clock?”

“Nine o'clock,” Crowley agrees, thinking he'll have a look over his plants this evening, see what insubordination has been occurring in his absence. He gives Aziraphale a warm ciao as he leaves.

He whistles as he walks back to the Bentley, and Aziraphale waves from the shop window as he drives off. It's tipping into dusk, and Crowley considers what he'll pack, what cassettes he has in the car for the drive, the two of them, the road and whatever they find at the end. The night is warm and the moon is out even as the street-lamps come on.

By nine o'clock, Aziraphale is gone.  
  


* * *

 

A precision of motion, and a wobble of rhythmic circles as the man intones and gyrates like a lazy spinning top. His robe is pocked with dried tallow wax, and over-sized, deliberately so. He believes the excess length of the sleeves gives him an air of mystery, and he's been misled.

He has anointed his forehead and fingers with the sticky oil to ward off demonic intent, and it's dripping down his face with the slow dribble of honey. He's burned herbs to cleanse the air. It is the middle of the night, because all the books say that this is the only proper time to do this sort of thing. The books have not been written by experts.

On the floor, a series of concentric circles have been laboured over in dusty chalk, a huge intricate spirograph that takes up most of the floor-space of the room. At the centre, about the width of a Premier Inn en-suite bathroom, is the masterpiece that it has taken Frederick Roseley ten years to design and create – a bubble of perfectly formed glass, flattened at the bottom to create a floor. Carved delicately into the glass and detailed precisely in chalk on the wooden floorboards, pretentious symbols abound, clearly demonstrating that humans, and especially this one, have no real clue what most of them mean and are making things up on the spot to sound knowledgable and sell things. Wiccan runes and Norse letters are mixed with the Enochian alphabet. At the compass points of the outer edge of the circle, on four plinths there sits a stick of knobbly wood professing to be a wand; a pewter necklace in the shape of a pentacle; a dull-edged knife and a chalice nicked from a church vestibule.

He's lit the candles at the edges of the circle. He's positioned the items of power and triple-checked his evocation markings. He'd almost finished an hour ago, but he'd worried over the security of the circle and had then had to run upstairs to the pantry to find some salt to go over his outer circle lines, just to make sure. Salt applied and bowl of holy water within easy reach, Frederick Roseley monotonously and arduously intones the scared words of summoning, raising his hands to their zenith like he wants to work out a stretch in his back.

There is no rustle of wind or howling storm outside, but Roseley is patient and undeterred.

On any other day, today's evocation would have ended like all the others; disappointingly, with blown out candles and a grumpy concession to sod it, have a takeaway and watch BBC Four to calm down. The house is quiet, empty but for him, and his wayward attempt would have been forgotten by morning.

But in applying his salt lines, Frederick's cloak has smudged some of his chalk drawings. Rendering his Leviathan's Cross and unicursal hexagram barely readable as to what they're intended to be, but understandable, in the most cruel and cursory of flukes, as something else. A slight shifting of the universe to a different alignment, a smudging of the general rules.

Roseley recites and chants and gets an itch at the side of his nose, and doesn't realise he's going to be the first human to ever be sort of successful in what he will achieve.

There is a wrenching, popping sound, like a plug being pulled out of a full bath, and then a being staggers as they appear in the glass bubble, dropping into sitting out of surprise.

“Goodness me!” the man-shaped being exclaims.

He looks around with the wide-eyed look of someone who has taken a very wrong turning somewhere further back down the road. Taking in the flickering candles, the chalk lines, and then at Roseley, standing at the edge with his arms still raised with his too-long sleeves.

The expression on his face is quickly becoming indignant. Not at all demonic like Roseley has been expecting. He's wearing gingham trousers and a bow-tie for a start. None of the books had mentioned anything about that.

“What?” the being splutters furiously. “is the meaning of this?”  
  


* * *

 

Crowley waits ten minutes after nine, lounging against the side of the Bentley with his hair perfectly moulded with product and his shoes carefully pressured into honing their best shine before tapping at the door. Aziraphale isn't famed for his punctuality but he's usually mostly on time. Crowley reckons that either he's struggling to decide between Dijon and wholegrain mustard to go with the ham sandwiches, or he's labouring over which of his selection of books he should bring for some light reading, and figures he should go and put him out of his misery before he pulls something in his brain.

He nudges the lock, knocking the bell on his way in, calling out Aziraphale's name in a questioning, exasperated way that he hopes communicates exactly how long he's been standing outside waiting.

The shop is silent. The shelves that usually crowd in imposingly, bent-backed from years of service, are empty, polished of dust, and in the corner stands a small mountainside of boxes, carefully labelled with contents and preservation instructions. Crowley stops, feeling wrong-footed, staring at the boxes, the air thick with the stench of furniture polish. He looks down, and sees that even the floors have been waxed.

“Aziraphale?”

He walks into the kitchenette, and it's as though Aziraphale was just here. The radio has been turned down low, playing Classic FM. There's the wicker hamper there on the table-top, the cutlery and glasses washed and cleaned to be stowed inside. Inside the fridge are precisely wrapped piles of charcuterie and cheeses, and a cooling bottle of prosecco. Aziraphale had opened a packet of Jacob's crackers to munch on as he'd prepared, and there are crumbs scattered about over the floor. On the paltry kitchen counter that counts as Aziraphale's workspace, he's laid out a row of artisan bread slices, half buttered.

Aziraphale hasn't left. Was here, hours ago, preparing, fussing over the little details. His jacket is folded carefully over the back of the kitchen chair. He hasn't just gone anywhere, because he would have told Crowley. Crowley would have gone with him.

The thought leaves Crowley oddly weightless because a swell of a newer, sharper panic rolls in.

Something's happened.

There's the smell of something off in the air, like mould and damp and chalk dust. There's a butter-knife on the floor as though it's been dropped. Aziraphale has left his coat, and Aziraphale said he would _be here_ and he isn't.

The angel wouldn't have left him, so someone has taken him. Stolen him from Crowley.

He's reminded of a building on fire, screaming and choking through the smoke, and he shakes his head. He's feeling a wash of panic begin to rise, doesn't know what to do with the rage beginning to crackle under his skin.

He wonders which of them took him.

He's had Aziraphale back for barely a week, and one of them _took_ him.

He snarls and stalks out of the bookshop.  
  


* * *

 

“I know you're there, you know,” the being calls out shrilly, banging a fist on the glass. “Excuse me! It's jolly rude, lurking like that. Excuse me!”

Roseley has in fact, been standing outside the door since he bolted out of the room, and has been trying to psych himself up for the last couple of hours. If he's being honest, he doesn't have the confidence that his spells have held – the wards he drew were designed to dampen and cut off a demon's power, but... well, he doesn't know quite what's he's ensnared. If he's being even more honest, he would rather close his eyes and have the thing just go right back to where it came from, no questions asked.

When he finds the courage to go back inside, the candles have long guttered out, and he flails for the overhead light which flickers and beams harshly. The being blinks at the sudden illumination and winces.

Roseley takes a shaky breath and walks to the edge of the chalk line. The being takes a slight, wary step back, looking him up and down with the same matronly disapproving over-the-glasses look as many of his nanny's and more than one of his wives.

And Roseley, well, he's not sure what to make of whatever he's got a hold of. The being has a smart, faintly creased check shirt that looks like it's shuffling a few decades behind the current fashion, the sleeves precisely rolled to above the elbow. He has a bow tie that appears slightly askew. His hair, shockingly blond to the point of whiteness, has sprung up messily. He doesn't look sly or fiendish or any of the adjectives stressed in the book.

Incensed would be more the word.

“And just who do you think you are,” the being demands, drawing himself up to his full height, “to be dragging me here at the all hours of the night?”

“You mean, you don't know?” Roseley asks hoarsely. He tries to hold himself straighter in response, to look taller than he really is, but he gets a crick in his neck and has to abort that angle. “You can't look into my soul, find out?”

“Firstly,” says the being coldly, “why _on earth_ would I want to do that? And of course, no, you know fine well, what with this contraption you've locked me in to.”

“You mean....” Roseley licks his dry lips, feeling he could do with a sit down. He didn't quite think of adding chairs to the summoning room. “You... aren't a demon?”

The being gives a stupefied splutter.

“This is prepos.... Do I _look_ like a demon?” he exclaims.

“I was trying to summon a demon!” says Roseley defensively.

“Well, congratulations, you failed,” says the being scathingly, folding his arms. “Now, will you let me out of this thing so I can go home?”

Roseley pauses. “What will you do if I let you out?”

“I _will_ ,” the being says, managing to pirouette a fine tight-rope between long-suffering and enraged. “... continue with what I was doing before I was so unceremoniously yanked into this delightfully draughty dungeon of yours...”

“It's the old grain storage,” Roseley corrects pettily, his feelings of being incredibly patronised over-weighing his fear momentarily. “Under the foundation of my estate.”

“And where is that exactly?”

“What will you do with that information?”

The being throws up his hands in exasperation.

“Nothing! Look, my dear fellow, there has been some sort of embarrassing mix-up here, happens to the best of us, I assure you, no one to blame. But as charming as your basement is, I want to go _home_. Just break the seal and let me go. You can't just keep me here!”

The infuriated stranger in the glass bubble doesn't look like a demon. He looks like the sort of person who would write to Gardener's Question Time about the state of his petunias, or who collects stamps. He has neatly manicured nails and a round stomach and he looks, underneath his bluster and affront, quite anxious.

Roseley has never seen a demon before. The books told him to be wary. That they were tricksters, able to take forms of human and beast, that they would try and beguile him, tempt him into the circle, to break the seal. If he lets him out, who knows what manner of calamity he'll invite upon himself.

“I'll think about it,” he stammers and steeling his shoulders, turns away.

“You cannot be serious!” the being exclaims, his voice growing thready, high-pitched. “Look, this is a huge misunderstanding, y-you _can't,_  do you understand, let me out!”

Roseley slams the door closed on the being's protests.  
  


* * *

 

There is a Gothic-looking building off Oxford Street that looks like a bank. Like the British Museum lions but trying too hard to be edgy and in-keeping with the overall theme, there are two gurning gargoyles at the foot of pristine stone steps leading up to the main entrance. The building implies a lot of things about where its finances have ultimately come from, and its thick wooden doors, lacquered in a sultry red, suggest to all passing that they have a particular clientele at a particular pay-grade and it is not going to be theirs.

Crowley lurks outside. He's got the clothing to suggest he might work there, a vicious, expensive line to his suit and a thrumming restless energy like he's been supplementing his financial lifestyle with too many pills. He glowers at anyone who looks his way and they give him a berth in the shape of an increasingly widening semi-circle.

Using a sleek and up-market mobile that cost more than his monthly inner-city rent, he calls Downstairs.

His first contact is not promising.

“Speak,” comes the abrupt summons of the help-desk.

There is a wail of torment in the background, but that's similar to most banks.

“It's me,” he says firmly. “Crowley.”

The demon on the other end curses, tries to smother the speaker with their hand, panics when they can't find an immediate superior to tell them what to do, and puts the phone down.

Crowley has maybe been expecting this response.

He pockets his phone, stalks up to the red lacquered doors and shoves them open.

The demon behind the help desk makes a 'mep' noise as he strides over.

“I want to talk to someone about the angel,” he says, in a perfected way that implies both politeness and untold violence. It's a combination he had been singularly failing at achieving for most of his materialisation on Earth, although Aziraphale had always kindly assured him he'd get it one day.

The demon at the desk blanches a funny colour, and Crowley adds a bitingly sharp smile to his demands.

“T-t-he....” the demon looks like she's about to become incorporeal on the spot.

“The angel,” Crowley repeats. He allows his words to take on a pallor of rain-clouds and thunderstorms. “In fact, the only angel in operation on Earth, in London.”

“I wouldn't know anything about...”

“Then put me through to someone who will,” Crowley interrupts, and adds more teeth to his smile. “Put me through to Acquisitions.”

The demon hasn't even asked for his ID. If she had, she'd know that he has really no right, or business or power to be barging in demanding things. But Crowley is beyond kowtowing to their rules and positions. A week ago, things were very different. He's grown spiritually, if you want to think of it that way. His limited loyalty to this office got rescinded when he stood next to an angel to tell Satan to get fucked, and any lingering nerves about retribution and punishment shrivelled up and died when they _stole_ that angel from him right before their bloody holiday.

“Acquisitions?” the demon repeats slowly and hopefully. She has the exact relieved tone of someone who knows that whatever it is, it's going to be someone else's problem if she just keeps her head down.

Crowley's smile looks like a rend across his face.

“Putting you through!” she trills nervously. “Second floor, third on your right.”

“Thankss,” Crowley says, and stalks off.

“A-all hail his infernal Majesty!” she stammers as a learned-by-rote farewell. Crowley ignores her.

The geography of Hell is difficult to describe to mortals, being on all planes and existing concurrently in all time and space. This part of Hell, to some mortal eyes, looks exactly like an investment bank, although on different levels it looks somewhat different, and more full of burny stuff.

On reaching the second floor, Crowley slams open the office door, trying very hard to look imposing (which he is not) and furious (which he most definitely is).

“Good morning, Master Crowley,” says the demon who greets him. Corpulent, bored-sounding, and clearly in the midst of filing his nails when the demon at the front desk buzzed up in warning. “Welcome to Infernal Acquisitions. How may we be of service?”

“I want to know,” Crowley seethes (and slightly pants, because those stairs were not kind to his knees nor his unnecessary lungs). “What exactly Hell is playing at, making a open and obvious pass for an Enemy operative. Immediately after, I might add, what was very nearly a full-scale war.”

The demon's forehead folds in displeasure at the mention.

“I'm afraid I don't quite see...”

“The angel,” Crowley snaps. “The angel of London. Who worksss here, in this city. The only angel. The one who hasss mysterioussly just vanisshed.”

The demon pauses for a heavily laden moment.

“The angel,” comes the dry response. A singular, well-plucked eyebrow is sardonically raised.

“Yes.”

“This would be the angel Aziraphale, involved in thwarting the goals and plan of our Infernal Majesty. And you think he's here? In Hell?”

“Well, is he?” Crowley hisses, and the sigh he gets in reply is dusty and sarcastically deferential. He gives Crowley a look that suggests that he might think this is all well and amusing but some of them have real work to be getting on with. Crowley gives a look back that replies with several rather uncouth expletives.

The demon slopes over to his desk and picks up a thick pile of paperwork. There is the scratching of long fingers as he turns the pages, and the demon interjects with some thoughtful humming noises.

There's a paperweight on his desk, and Crowley wants to break it over his head.

He wonders what on earth he's going to do if it turns out Aziraphale is here. Something violent and foolish, Crowley assumes.

A final sigh, and the demon looks back at him, putting the papers down.

“There's nothing on the roster here,” he says firmly. “General ground-rules are to ignore the both of you until certain courses of action have been established.”

“You mean...?”

“I _mean_ ,” the demon stresses curtly. “That if anything has happened, it would be an in-house matter. We wouldn't be having anything to do with the relocation of angel types. I would suspect it's an enquiry best directed to the other lot.”

“I see,” Crowley replies.

Useless, he thinks, utterly bloody useless.

He thinks that banging the door shut and frightening the help-desk demon on the way out would make him feel better, but it doesn't.

 _Manners, my dear_ , Aziraphale would have said, but Aziraphale isn't here, should be here, but that's the whole bloody problem.

So that decides it, he thinks as he gets back in the Bentley he's parked on a double yellow, clicking the clamp off with a thought.

He'll have to talk to upstairs instead.  
  


* * *

 

It would be an incorrect assessment to claim that Aziraphale is not worried. In fact, the angel is realising that, really, he has spent a lot of his life up to this point concerned about one thing or another, whether he's doing the right thing or saying the right words or following the right plan. Things get muddied so very easily for him, there's always questions on top of questions and very few answers, and it seems so simple for everyone else. There is Good and there is Evil and that is that.

It was simple then, on the tarmac of a military base, gripping his reclaimed sword fiercely and prepared to be extinguished from existence on a fool's hope. The ground had been solid and his hold had been steady, and he'd _known_ , finally known what side he was on after all those years.

The worry now fizzes in the centre of him like an alka-seltzer. The panic is like a headache building up.

He spends a long time going over every inch of his glass prison. It's maybe three strides across if he's charitable, so there's not anywhere else he can go. Testing the smooth curved walls with his fingers, reading the inscriptions which are precisely and incorrectly carved, tutting at the grammar and conjunction of the runic symbols all thrown together as a hodgepodge.

Every so often, he'll tentatively give a push to see if he can use his powers. He does this, because logically he knows that it's impossible for him to be he's unable to. It's all tied up as part of his Grace, a similar part that allows him to inhabit an almost-mortal form. His body Is. Change is a human quality, not divine. His Grace means he wants for no sustenance, needs no food nor shelter nor sleep. He doesn't get ill, and he doesn't get drunk unless he wants to, and – barring violent accidents – he won't be dying of anything any time soon.

He could shatter this glass with a gesture, but his powers are like a forgotten lyric at the back of his head. He can feel where the shape of them would be, the absence, and the cut-off brings him up short, makes him nauseous, incomplete and more vulnerable than he wants to admit.

He spends hours reading each of the runes and sigils drawn like children's doodles over the floor. It's a nonsense language and half of it doesn't mean anything, but there must be _something_ in there as to why someone has managed to imprison him, apparently by accident, so he perseveres.

The strange man in the ridiculous get-up hasn't come back since he legged it out the door, and Aziraphale's sick of the sound of his own muttering, his own footsteps as he paces. He's alone, utterly it seems, and he was not created to be so. He tries kicking the glass hard, and ends up clutching his foot in pain, feeling the bones realign themselves to his factory settings of unbroken. There are tears sprung up at the corner of his eyes, and he scolds himself with a thick voice, wiping them away harshly.

After a while he just sits, his forehead leant against the slight chill of the glass, closing his eyes against the beaming, unrelenting light. He ignores the damp brick walls of the house's foundation, the concrete flooring marred with chalk, the echo-sensation that while he doesn't need to eat or drink, he'd quite like to at this moment. He brings his knees up to his chest, and allows himself to selfishly think of how unfair this whole stupid mess is.

He was so looking forward to their holiday. There hadn't been much time to think before the end of the world, or, maybe more truthfully, Aziraphale had avoided doing too much thinking because he was never quite happy with the conclusions he came to. But in the quiet lull that shaped the formless days of the aftermath, things were different, and Aziraphale... he'd been thinking quite a lot. About what he wanted, _really_ wanted. Free from what he thought he should want, what others assumed he should want, what others told him he should want.

Aziraphale had wanted, entirely and completely for himself, so badly to leave it all behind.

Now of course, well the picnic will be ruined. The bread will be stale and he's not sure the cheese will keep, and even though he's no clue how long he's been here, they'll have lost the best days of Autumn where the breeze brings in pollen from the meadows and the sun strikes dappled on ponds and trees, and Crowley....

Oh Crowley.

He'll be so worried, he thinks miserably.

He hopes he doesn't do anything too rash in his absence.  
  


* * *

 

If Crowley was ever in the unlikely situation of having to explain to someone the exact set of emotions that came with his plan to call Heaven, he might hypothetically think of putting it a little like this:

Imagine you've gone through a bad break-up, full of lots of shouting and finger-pointing. Or left a cult, moved across the country and changed your number. Or decided to join the circus against the wishes of your disapproving and conservative family. Something in between these sort of describes Crowley's relationship with his former employers. And now, like having to call an ex to ask tentatively after some of his old things, he's aware that however high and noble his intentions are, this conversation is a few misconstrued words away from a blazing row. In a metaphorical sense.

He mutters to himself as he draws the imperfect lines in chalk – difficult on his well-varnished floor, knowing he'll never get the stink out of the grain. It is made even more difficult by the fact that Upstairs has, to all intents and purposes, blocked his number, and as such the chalk is not playing ball about inscribing the symbols he wants, the circle is shaky and is starting to smoke, and Crowley's hands feel like he's holding onto a pan that's been left on the boil for too long.

Aziraphale better bloody appreciate this when he gets back, he thinks sourly.

It takes a few tries to speak the special words to re-establish the connection, mostly because he retches around half of them, gagging on the sensation in his throat, has to force them through his unwilling, barely capable mouth.

He waits, feeling sweaty and queasy. He taps his shoes in an irregular beat, listening to the hum of the fridge.

The circle suddenly blossoms to life, glowing obnoxiously like a glitter-ball, and Crowley steps back from the main cone, feeling like he's standing back from an open oven.

“Divine greetings,” simpers the voice at the other end. “You have reached our help-desk. How may we be of service?”

Crowley swallows, coughs to clear his throat, and regrets this whole endeavour deeply. He clears his throat again to see if it will help any.

“Hey,” he says, forcefully calm. “Listen, I'm calling from Earth....”

“Could I have your customer reference number?”

“My... my what?”

The voice is placid and soothing as an untroubled lake, and is going a long way to pissing Crowley off without doing anything at all. Aziraphale, he thinks with a loyal certainty, was never this bad, even in the early days.

“All enquiries are assigned with a customer reference number in order to help streamline the process of aiding and answering your query.”

“I don't... I don't have any...”

“Your customer reference number will be clearly displayed on any official missives that have been sent to you.”

For _someone's_ sake.

Crowley edges closer to the circle warily, wincing slightly as the warmth as though from a particularly bright Mediterranean afternoon starts to creep through the layers of his jacket.

“Look,” he tries again. “I don't have a number. My name is Crowley. I'm from Downstairs.”

There is an excruciatingly awkward silence.

“Ah,” the voice says eventually, a bit more faintly, clearly scrabbling for what to say in the absence of a carefully written company-approved script. “You'll... you'll have to excuse me, we don't really get... I mean, not many of your sort try and get in touch.”

Crowley is going to lose a perfectly functional set of teeth if he has to keep grinding them in an effort to chew back his words.

“I am calling to enquire about my counterpart here on Earth,” he pushes through. “Aziraphale, Principality? He's been an operative for about six thousand years.”

“I'm not sure I can disclose...”

“It's nothing confidential,” he emphasises. “Could you just... put me through to someone who might be able to tell me if he's been reassigned?”

There is another pause, before it's followed by a slightly strained “Hold please!”

Crowley sighs, and thinks he might be finally getting somewhere.

He is, as is often the case, wrong.

Over the next four hours, Crowley is passed from Personnel Management to Relocation Affairs to Interdepartmental Services, before being shunted back to Personnel Management via the Postal Room. He's had the same conversation repeatedly with a host of different morons, he's been tooth-achingly polite for hours and hours, he's had to listen to he isn't sure how many versions of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 as he's left on hold, and still he has no idea where Aziraphale is.

He is reassured slightly to know that Aziraphale would have lost his temper with this whole rigmarole ages ago.

“Listen here,” he bites when he's picked up again by Personnel. “I just want to know where he is. Surely you would have documents, records...”

“The department has been going through a major reshuffle over the last week,” the angel says frostily. “We ask that all enquiries are directed through the proper channels, and we can guarantee we'll get back to you within ten working days...”

“I don't have ten days!” Crowley practically shouts. “Could you just.... Can you just get his file? It'll tell you where he's stationed, won't it? If he's been moved, his current location. You keep tracks on all of your agents so surely you could do this one teeny tiny little thing and then I'll leave you alone and you can go back to organising your files in peace.”

There is a sigh, an exasperated ' _Fine_ ', and Liszt comes back. Crowley resists the very real urge to draw obscene sigils into the connection line.

After a few minutes, the line is picked up again.

“Erm, Mr... Crawly was it?”

“Crowley.”

“I see,” the angel repeats, sounding like he doesn't give the slightest jot about it. “Look here, Crawly, I have the angel's file here. Aziraphale, Principality, on Permanent Assignment on Earth.”

“Yes?” Crowley prompts.

“And... it's a little embarrassing really, must be an administrative error, not my department at all...”

“Has be been moved?” Crowley stresses. “Relocated? Reassigned?” He swallows and breathes harshly out. “Fired?”

“None of those, Mr Crawly,” the angel sounds uncomfortable. “His assignment, from the paperwork, is the same as it's been these past thousands of years, his last known location was in Soho at his residence. His current location is merely....inaccessible at the moment.”

Crowley's response is very slow and serpentine.

“What does that mean – inaccessible?”

“It's highly irregular!” says the angel. “Within all rights, it shouldn't be possible – we know where all God's creatures are on His Earth, and for him to have vanished, it simply can't be done, it must be an error....”

“But it has been done!” Crowley interjects, getting heated. “Because he's not _here_. He's not Above or Below so where is he?”

“I'm sorry to have been unable to help you with your request, Mr Crawly,” says the angel faintly. “If you would be so kind, please fill out a satisfaction report regarding how you've found our service.”

“Wait a minute! Isn't there someone else who could....?”

The call is sharply dropped, the light snaps out like the click of finger, and Crowley is left standing in the middle of his living room now grown dark, having absolutely no clue what to do next.  
  


* * *

 

Roseley had quite fancied – once upon a time, when he was younger, died his hair black and walked around dressed like he was in a thrash metal band – to make a name for himself as the first official member of the Wizarding Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to properly summon a demon. His membership request had been denied, and so had subsequent requests to the Grand Guild of Trans-Pacific Wizards, the Warlocks of Gwynedd and the Witches Coven of Shrewsbury. By that time, he'd got a job doing exactly the same thing as his father had done, which was moving vast amounts of money around according to a certain, inexplicable logic and going pheasant shooting once a year with lots of men who smoked and were in exactly the same line of business.

He'd gotten back  into wizardry after retirement. He'd dabbled at weekends, went to summoning circles and solstices at some of the local gatherings. Once his diagnosis had come through it'd taken a more serious edge. He'd scoured for old and rare books, spent a fortune on paraphernalia that promised to be a bridge to the unseen world of the occult. As a precaution, he'd set up a camera in his summoning room, hoping to catch the moment for subsequent accolades and glory.

And now, he's done it, in some fashion or another. And as it is, he tells no-one of his achievement, and retreats to the camera room from where he can safely watch what he's got his hands on.

Whatever it is, his wards are working as intended. It's becoming increasingly obvious that no powers, demonic or otherwise, can be used to effect the reality inside the glass cage, and the being is becoming increasingly desperate. He's got a face that shows anxiety well, worn lines of care scrunched around the corner of his eyes, across his forehead, his hands fluttery and nervous, and he seems to mutter to himself on occasion. The CCTV doesn't have sound, so he can't tell what he's saying. But maybe that's part of the act, be like the innocent flower or whatever Roseley's English teacher had been trying to educate him about.

Roseley is not an intelligent man, although he has pretensions to it, so in order to settle his growing terror at whatever is trapped in his basement, he thinks that it stands to reason he can work it out. He pours through his old tomes and books, reading about sprites and imps and familiars and demonic entities large and small, but none of them seem to fit with the infuriated man-shaped being that paces and frets around the limited circumference of his glass world.

He might not have a demon, and the thought sidles up to him that he might, just possibly, have accidentally scooped up a normal human being by mistake.

Deductions, he thinks, using a shaking hand to light his pipe and coughing and puffing his chest out.

The being, whatever he is, doesn't seem to need sleep. It wouldn't be easy, because in his haste to escape Roseley had left the overhead light on, but after a week, a human being would have succumbed to exhaustion. The being paces endlessly, testing all the edging of the glass, running his fingers over the imprints of the runic symbols and frowning. When he does finally sit down, looking haggard and worried, he doesn't sleep, just stares off at the walls, pondering with a wretched expression. His shock of white hair doesn't get greasy, he doesn't seem to sweat, doesn't faint from lack of food or water. At some point, he undoes his bow-tie and pops a button in his collar, but it's not because of the heat, and he doesn't seem effected by the low temperatures in the basement.

Roseley didn't design the glass for long-term liveability. His aims had been simple – summon a demon, contain the demon, and then the demon would disappear again. He hadn't thought more steps ahead because as the books made it out, there wasn't that much road to work with. As it stands, he hasn't the first clue of how to get rid of the thing in his summoning room without breaking the seal.

He would be the first in line to put his hand up and admit that he's in way over his head.

After a week of watching the uneasy, pacing being, he's been able to rule out human.

Roseley writes out a long list of questions and braves the room again for the next step.

The being is sitting down, cross-legged and lost in thought when he opens the door.

“Finally!” it coughs to clear its throat. “I hope you've finally seen sense, because really, this is most...”

“I have some questions for you, entity,” Roseley interrupts stiffly, standing taut in front of the being and ignoring his words.

The being's eyes spark with annoyance, and he stands wobbly, shaking out pins and needles from his leg.

“I have a name,” he bites out.

Roseley blinks. It hadn't been on his list of questions, and the statement has wrong-footed him somewhat. He hadn't thought that the being would have a name. It makes this all harder somehow.

“My name is Aziraphale,” continues the being bullishly. There's a pause and he taps his foot, the sound making a ringing sound against the glass floor. “It's considered polite, you know, to return the sentiment in kind.”

Roseley has the sudden impression of being at a fancy dinner party and being pulled up in front of everyone for not knowing which fork to use. He feels himself flushing.

“Frederick Roseley,” he says finally, and the being nods.

“Charmed, I'm sure,” he responds in a flat, chilly voice.

Roseley coughs, attempting to steel himself again, and holds the piece of paper in his hands further up. He'd written with a quill and ink, because it had felt like the right thing to do, but some of the letters have smudged and his penmanship leaves a lot to be desired.

“Firstly, hast thou the powers bequeathed to those who hath turned away from the light of the Lord on High into the clutches of his Infernal Majesty?”

The being Aziraphale blinks nonplussed.

“Pardon?” he says, before, “Oh.. well, you could have just said that _normally_. And as I've said repeatedly now, I'm not a demon or anything of the sort. Now, would you...”

“What are you?”

“I'm a bookseller,” says the being, and then he sniffs. “And you're a wizard, I suppose. Probably a weekend hobby until you retired, and now you've too much time on your hands, and think that rifling through the mysteries of the unknown because you've read a book or two is a good way to spend your time.”

Roseley clears his throat.

“How hath...?”

“No,” the being interrupts firmly. There's a high blush beginning to spread across his cheeks, and his hands have fisted by his sides. “No, I have a question for _you_. What sort of a person tries to summon a demon in the first place? Have you ever met any? For the most part, with some exceptions, poor company. Crude, unsubtle and obnoxious. What could you possibly want with them?”

“Are you trying to make me a deal?” Roseley attempts to clarify, thinking aha, he's got him here, but the being scoffs and rolls his eyes.

“I summoned a demon,” Roseley says, “to do my bidding.”

“My dear fellow, what could you possibly want enough to exchange your eternal soul for?”

“I would bid them restore my fortunes and my health. I have.... I have a disease. It's incurable, and it's slow and I want... no, I need more time. Could you offer me that, entity?”

The being shuffles his feet. He opens his mouth slightly, and then closes it again.

“Mr Roseley,” he says after a moment. “I am sorry for your suffering, I truly am.”

“So you'll help me?”

“I cannot help you. Such things are not in my hands.”

“But you're not human,” Roseley insists. “You have powers, surely you could give me...?”

The being looks straight at Roseley, pity in his round face.

“We all want more time, my dear fellow,” he says softly. “We all have regrets. It is the price for your humanity.”

“Then if you can't help me, what use are you?” Roseley snaps, and the being stands there, rolled-up sleeves and worn leather brogues, untouched by age or illness or hurt, and says nothing.

“Please,” the being finally says in reply. “Let me go.”

Roseley brings the list back up in his trembling hands, clears his stoppered throat.

“What manner of being or beast be ye that inhabits this circle?” he demands.

“If you'd just allow me....”

“What being or beast,” Roseley repeats louder, “inhabits this circle?”

The being has striking blue eyes, and he can barely meet them.

“Answer me!” he says angrily. “What are you?”

“I am the Principality Aziraphale,” the being says, “Guardian of the Eastern Gate and Angel of the Seventh Order.”

Roseley's breath comes out as a shudder.

An angel. _An angel._ Oh God.

“Prove it,” he whispers.

The being looks around guiltily, like he's expecting to be told off. There's a ripping sound and a flutter, and Roseley cries out in shock, tears in his eyes.

The being – the angel – stands awkwardly, holding himself self-consciously, wing-tips pointed skyward, cramped and curled against the upper curve of the glass. The width of his wings mean they span out wide, too wide for the space, and he has to hold him half ducked down to avoid squashing them. The feathers cascade down, pristine and startling in the dim shades of the room.

“Will that do?” he says impatiently.

“Oh God,” Roseley says finally, quaking where he stands. Because he's fucked now, well and truly, and he knows it in the marrow of his soul.

He's captured an angel. Imprisoned an angel.

There is nothing he can do in any version of this scenario to make this right.  
  


* * *

 

Weeks limp by. Crowley renews contacts he'd forgotten he'd had, the disparate connections that make up the poorly acknowledged ground troops of the armies of darkness; covens, satanist gatherings, knitting circles, and not one of them has heard a thing along their sparse and ill-tended grapevine. Closer to home, he asks the shop-workers and staff that make up the neighbourhood of Aziraphale's bookshop. The heavily tattooed couple that run the cafe Aziraphale likes to read in, the maître d' at a little exclusive little restaurant he sometimes frequents with Crowley, his bi-monthly manicurist, the booksellers that on the face of it make up his rivals but really function more as a local gossip circle.

“He was here, oh, on that Monday,” one of them, Dorcus Moring sticks her head in while Crowley's interrogating the part-timer on the till. “Bought a new book. He was ever so chipper. Said he was going away on holiday.”

Crowley tries to patiently explain he never got the chance to actually leave, but it isn't much use.

He makes several more irate phone calls to both Above and Below, and his line of inquiry swerves from questioning to outright accusation at their feckless attitude. The reason why, according to Above, is explained to him in dribs and drabs through clenched pearly-white teeth. From what Crowley can piece together and translate from their holier-than-thou bureaucratic linguistic charades, Aziraphale has apparently, actually vanished. No one in either court has any clue where the ball is, and frankly, it's ruffled a lot of feathers. Because it's meant to be impossible, and if someone that's not on either side has managed to get the drop on one of the Angels of the Lord for their own purposes, well, what it is is embarrassing from a PR perspective. The current line seems to be best just to wait for it to tide over, till Aziraphale pops up again, figure out things from there. They'd know if he'd discorporated, so he's obviously not in too much trouble.

Crowley is so enraged by the blasé callousness he's hearing that he swears profusely and virulently, managing to invent a few new ones before he's hung up on.

He entertains the idea that maybe one of them is lying but demons are notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and the angels would have been unbearably smug about it if they'd recalled an unwilling Aziraphale from his mortal assignment. They'd have also sent a replacement.

As it is, the shop sits empty, and Crowley puts his head in his hands and wonders what he's missing.

Eventually, both sides stop picking up his calls. And Crowley is on his own.

He can't stay here. He can't just give up.

Crowley makes arrangements for Aziraphale's books to go into storage. He has questions, of course he does, about why the angel had packed up all his many books, why he knew he was going to leave the shop, leave London, but didn't know what was coming.

The food in the kitchenette is beginning to go off, and when Aziraphale comes back, Crowley will get a disappointed sigh at the state of the place. So he grabs a plastic bag and throws away the bundles of grapes gone soggy and brown, the carefully wrapped meats, the now-stale pastries and crackers. He thinks about the picnic they'd have had. He'd have pulled the top down from the Bentley and let the wind tussle his hair, the weather of a glorious August now gone warming his skin. They would have chatted, sitting carefully on a tartan blanket, and they'd have made their own plans.

They might have even found the right time to talk properly. Honestly. About everything that's been, about the possibilities that could be now that everything's different.

About maybe not going back to London. Going back to their Jobs.

About leaving it all behind, together.

The words Crowley didn't say are clogging up his throat.

He's putting away the plates and cutlery from the hamper when he finds the pieces of paper, carefully folded and stored behind the cake plate.

Crowley didn't even know Aziraphale knew that he had a printer, much less how to use one. He stares down uncomprehending at three shoddily-printed webpages, clearly running out of ink and mixing the remainders, all from property websites. Advertising small cottages across Essex and Sussex. All situated in quiet little villages with big gardens, trees in the front of the house laden with fruit, boughs crouching over a white-painted wooden gate. In the margins in Aziraphale's infuriatingly neat hand-writing, he's made little notes about each property; _space for herb-garden, sizeable conservatory in the back for plants, large pantry, could be converted to acceptable-sized library._

Crowley's brow crinkles up like a crisp packet, and for a second, he doesn't understand.

The truth settles like a deep snow over him, and he has to sit down heavily at the table.

He thinks about Aziraphale's giddiness, his excitement. His mysterious desire to go to the countryside for a trip, his over-joyed response when Crowley had agreed. The fact he'd packed up his whole shop in preparation.

Aziraphale had _wanted_ to stay out there. To shut up shop on a life-time of following orders and worrying about rules and plans, to leave without permission and just not go back. To buy a quaint little cottage somewhere on the South Downs with space for life's comforts and away from all the politics they've been embroiled in for far too long.

And above all else, he'd wanted Crowley to come with him. To _be_ with him.

Maybe Aziraphale had planned on asking him in that indirect, hand-wringing way of his, or maybe he'd just assumed that if he showed Crowley the houses, he would have understood, and said yes, because Crowley would have, _he would have,_ in a heartbeat, the image of two mismatched shoes stood neatly by the doorway resounding loudly in his head. He's staring down at a little white-washed cottage on the edge of a West Sussex village, where Aziraphale's written things like _should have enough space for C's plants_ and _C will want good wifi – check connection?_ and Crowley's eyes are beginning to blur. He looks up, breathing hard and blinking rapidly, pressing his lips tightly together because Aziraphale had wanted this, wanted this life, wanted _him_ , and now he's vanished somewhere, and Crowley's fast realising he can't... he wasn't meant to be here, not alone.

Crowley rubs his hands roughly over his face and sniffs, wipes at his eyes, trying to pull himself together.

It doesn't work.  
  


* * *

 

Roseley spends a long time, thinking about what to do. If he was an ambitious, more ruthless man, he'd be able to take advantage of this, reap the benefits and rewards he feels the world owes him for what he's done. He'd invite hand-picked selections of the greatest to marvel at his trophy trapped like a creature in amber, he'd bask in the honours and praise for his hard-work, his ingenuity at capturing an angel. He'd work out how to manipulate his success, how to improve on it, and in time he'd make the angel follow his bidding, willing or not. But Roseley is not ambitious, and has never quite been ruthless enough to be successful in his field. He is not a cruel man, in the way that most men aren't deliberately cruel, but yet he's not a kind man in the way most men are not unselfishly kind.

He's a man, old and dying and frightened for the future. He's tormented in his dreams by visions of damnation, of vengeful angels, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah brought down upon his head for his pride and over-reaching avarice.

Rather than do something – do what he knows really is the right thing – he cowers, and for a long time, does nothing at all.

He never goes back to the summoning room. He can't meet the baleful eye of the angel he's imprisoned in shining glass, that he's trapped down in the dark. He feels guilt at what he's done, but his guilt is not greater than his fear of retribution and so he does nothing.

He orders the door barred so no-one can enter without a key. He retreats from the world, reclusive and distressed by nameless fears. Weeks pass into months.

The room is in darkness, but the CCTV works in night vision. Nightly, awoken by shadowy dreams, he watches the ethereal green-ish shape of the angel on the camera. Growing more feverish as time passes, more desperate, slamming his hands and fists on the immovable glass, crying out in fury and pain. He'll continue relentlessly before he's forced to stop, clutching his hands in agony, and then he'll try with his wings, and he must be damaging himself somehow because he has to stop, bent on all fours, his hands curled into claws. His head pressed hard against the glass floor, breathing hard, his body shaking. He'll sleep then, or collapse, it's difficult to tell, and then when he awakes his injuries must have healed or the pain has been numbed because he'll start again, slamming and screaming soundlessly to Roseley's ears. He wonders what he shouts for, what he's saying.

Finally, he can't take watching it any more, and switches off the screen.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoo, this one got a bit out of hand. 
> 
> Part II has become a bit longer than originally planned - rest assured, there is actually comfort on the way! The tags don't lie!
> 
> (That being said however, slight warnings for violent imagery in this chapter)

A man in dark glasses comes to look at the house late on a Saturday. The estate agent had been on the phone that morning, eager to stress to Marjorie that this one was a very interested party, some important type from the city, couldn't have made it any earlier what with work; I know it's unorthodox, he'd repeated apologetically, the buzz of another call being transferred to hold injecting in the conversation at intervals, but would Marjorie mind showing the gentleman around out of office hours, just this once.

Marjorie has kept odd hours since her George went, so she agrees. She shuffles around with the radio in on the background, making everything neat, straightens the cushions in the living room, checking for dust over the fire-place until she hears a knock at the door.

The man is younger than she'd expected. He smiles demurely, and shakes her hand like a perfect gentleman, thanking her for letting him see the place at such short notice like she's been personally responsible for reuniting him with a treasured possession. He wears sunglasses and doesn't look like he's going to consider taking them off, and his hair glints like scattered sparks as he stands under the hall-light. He looks as if he's either a musician of some sort, or a sartorially inclined businessman.

She shows him around the place, dutifully going through the figures and details that the estate agent expressly told her to mention – installation dates, tax brackets, renovation possibilities. He hums, but with the polite, uninterested sound of someone making noise on the telephone to reassure the other that they're still listening, and she's not really interested in all that stuff anyway, so she stops.

Eventually, without really knowing why she does it, she starts talking to the stranger about George. While wandering through the living room, she points out his favoured reading chair near the gas-fire. When they take a walk about of the bay doors onto the patio and garden beyond, she idly tells him about how he'd sit out in the garden, book avidly clutched in hand while she pottered around the conservatory. Squinting something fierce with the sun but determined to enjoy the book, refusing to take off more than a layer of clothing, and sweltering in cotton trousers and waistcoat.

Mr Crowley – call me Anthony please – had seemed to listen to that. Smiles in all the right places, gives responses where they were due.

He seems like a nice man, she thinks as she walks him through the kitchen. A little distant, but perhaps he's tired from the drive.

“There's been some real interest in the property,” she says, and she looks him over, well-dressed, a deliberately crafted aesthetic that she'd definitely not be able to afford on her pension, and tries not to seem too disapproving. A sale is a sale after all. “A lot of city folk wanting a second home out in the countryside. Seasonal holidayers mostly. Would that be your sort of interest, Mr...”

Anthony Crowley doesn't answer her. He's looking around with a serious sort of attention at their current room, enacting a respectful silence you find only in museums and art galleries.

He runs a hand over the mahogany shelving.

He's been most complimentary about the garden and the kitchen and the size of the bedrooms, but she thought he'd appreciate this one. Her George's pride and joy.

“It's a beautiful library,” he says. There's a sincerity there like the chime of a glass. He takes in the exposed wooden beams overhead, the shelving that curves around the wall and travels off into the next room, the bay window and the cushioned window-seat that makes a cove to sit in, catches the mid-morning light in the summer months.

“Are you a collector yourself?” she says pleased – none of the other viewers had expressed anything other than a cursory interest, one of them even implying that they'd likely convert it into an office. “My George, bless him was always a one for books. Squirrelling them away when he thought I couldn't tell he'd bought another one. Endless Saturdays at car boot sales and church fairs, going through all the boxes.”

Anthony Crowley's reservedly polite expression opens up with a lost-looking smile that doesn't know how to sit on his face.

“My one's the same,” he says fondly, before he tightens his jaw. “He's... he couldn't make it today, but he'd really love this.”

“You two married?” she asks, because that's the sort of thing that's OK these days. Marjorie wouldn't have guessed the young man was that way, but she figures you never can really assume. She'd thought Alma and Therese were sisters when they first moved to the village until George had laughingly corrected her.

His face rifles through a series of complicated emotions. He finally picks out a wry, sad expression, like a nostalgia for lost seasons.

“Might as well be,” he says, and she nods.

“Me and my George ran away and eloped, you know,” she says conspiratorially. “Oh it's not much to say now, but in those days, it was a right scandal, two unmarried people running off together. But one day George just arrived at my door while my parents were out, his suitcase beside him, told me he'd packed everything up, and that there was a train in an hour if we hurried.”

“What did your parents say?” the young man asks, appearing genuinely interested.

“I don't know,” she says dismissively. “We never spoke again. George's parents came round eventually, but mine... well, some people's understanding of the world can't be changed. It is as it is. I had George, and I've had a better life with him in it than I ever would have done without.”

Anthony Crowley nods like he understands. She thinks, looking at him, that maybe he really does.

“Our sides...” he says, unfolding the words like delicate paper. “...wouldn't approve.”

“Different churches as well?” she says sympathetically.

He quirks a smile. “Something like that.”

She looks out of the bay window to the shadowed garden outside. It's not dark, the sky like a new bruise, but the days are shortening as they hasten towards winter.

“It's a shame you couldn't come earlier,” she says. “It's a little dark now, but the gardens are quite beautiful in the sunlight.”

“I'm sure they are,” he replies vaguely, only half paying attention, forming the words as though struggling through the waves of some other sea of thought. His gaze lingers on the shelving, the window seat shrouded in shadows.

He puts in an offer the next morning, two times over the asking price, payment in cash.

Marjorie had already decided it was best in his hands anyway. She accepts, knowing George would approve.

 

* * *

 

Aziraphale has never asked Crowley how he'd describe him. Those sorts of questions, he finds, present themselves only in magazines that discuss the relevance of star-signs, or have entertaining little quizzes that while away the time asking if you prefer green or blue, or rocks or sticks, and then come along with an arbitrary sign to explain your whole identity. It's an improvement, he supposes, from reading the dregs of a tea-cup and demonising the left-handed, but on the whole it's a bit silly. He'd always quietly assumed Crowley's lot had something to do with it.

What Crowley's hypothetical answer would have been is dependant on external factors. Depending on the day you caught him, Crowley might grouch at Aziraphale's particular brand of unyielding surety like a devotedly dogged angelic sales-being, and for his ability to always put on a tone of voice to come across like he was the voice of reason in his most unreasonable moments. If pushed, and if the situation was ever to call for heart-bearing declarations of admiration, Crowley might have begrudgingly voiced his respect for the fact that, when push comes to shove and there's backs against the wall, when Aziraphale sets himself to something he is the most bloody-minded bastard Crowley has ever had the fortune of knowing.

Aziraphale tells himself he'll get himself out of here, so that's what he's going to do.

It is a notably singular challenge. It's lucky that Aziraphale spent those early days pouring over every inch of his surroundings, committing it to perfect memory; unlike Crowley, his body does not have the luxury of coming pre-equipped with being able to see in the dark. He works through every rune that he recalls, mulling them over and over, trying to find a pattern without success. After a while, he resorts to the very human response of trying to batter his way out. The glass is reinforced, too thick to even entertain the most hairline of cracks, but Aziraphale gives it a bloody good go for as long as his body can bear.

It's while lying on his back, panting and biting his lips as he feels a snapped ligament realign inside his arm, that he starts thinking about the circle. Circles generally really. In theory, although it's both incredibly unlikely and strongly discouraged, anyone can draw a circle to summon or contact anyone else. As a modern method of communication, they're laughable now, a relic of the old days of candles and chicken-blood, but in the same way that people go scrabbling for the matches when there's a power cut, it's not like they don't work per se. Heaven's switchboard always favoured them because they're tassled with just the sort of pomp and circumstance that reminds them of the good old days; indeed, when Aziraphale was last up there for a performance review they'd just tabled and voted down a motion to install phone lines like the other lot. Wi-fi was a dim and distant marvel.

But circles are the old reliable because they usually work. It's about will you see, using the right symbols in the right order, shouting very hard down the line and hoping the other side will pick up. Heaven would.

Aziraphale isn't going to call Heaven.

He gnaws at his lip as he considers things carefully. It's not like he's short on time. The real stumbling block here is the lack of a conduit. His will is all well and good, an above average one if he was being modest, but there needs to be a channel, a line of gouged-out sand running the rock-pool water back into the tide. His sterile world doesn't exactly have chalk to draw the lines out, and it needs to be the right stuff in order to work; symbolically weighty, meaningful. There's not a great deal of things to choose from.

There's only one possibility he can think of. He winces in distaste and studies the space where his hands would be held in front of his face.

_I can call Crowley,_ he scolds himself for his hesitation, clinging to that buoy. _I can go home. Just this, and I'll be free._

Before he can change his mind, he grits his teeth and smashes his fist against the glass.

He cries out, the shuddering recoil bounding up his arm, sucking air through his teeth and teetering perilously close to cursing, before he pulls back and does it again, harder, feeling the bones crimp and shatter on impact. _Come on,_ he thinks, or maybe he says out loud, and then he does it again and again and again until the skin from his knuckles has spilt open in a bloody smile, his mangled hand useless and dripping. He takes shuddering, hitching breaths and sways, dizzy with pain. With a shaking finger from his other hand, whining when he touches the burning flesh, he leans down and starts to daub the wide circle carefully onto the glass floor, following his recollection of the space. It's pitch-black and he can't see what he's drawing, but he's patient and precise and his memory is impeccable. He feels his hand begin to heal up, his knuckles popping back in with a crunch.

And now back to square one.

_Home. Crowley._

Again and again he punches his fist into the unyielding glass, his shouts shrinking into whimpers that gargle in his throat. Just a little more, he moans to himself, pulling his fist back, come on, you can do it, just get through this, and you'll be home.

It takes longer than he'd like to draw the circle, the correct runes and verses from the Kabbala. When he finishes, he lies coiled, cradling his healing hand, willing his body to stop shivering violently. Patterned around him, the blood begins to crust and dry. There should really be something flaming at the corners, tea lights or similar, but Roseley kindly never moved the burnt wax of his evocation candles from the circumference of his chalk circle, and really, they're just for show.

After a long while, Aziraphale manages to get up onto his knees. The pain is softening into a memory. He kneels gingerly in the centre of his bloody circle, and clearing his choked up throat, starts to, very clearly, say the Words.

When it comes to contacting others through a spiritual plane, it's not about having the right phone number as it were. You've drawn your telephone with all its parts and transistors, the correct things to make it go, but that's half of it. It's more about saying the Words right, the cosmic equivalent of making the dial tone yourself, and being very clear and insistent on your mental picture.

Aziraphale thinks of Crowley so hard it hurts, and says the Words.

There is no beam of light, no shudder like an earth tremor, no indication of a connection of any sort. Like searching for a signal in a rural black spot, Aziraphale keeps going, repeating the words over and over and over. Praying for something, _anything_ to show he's getting through.

He tries Crowley for he doesn't know how long. Could be hours, or days or more. Forces himself to think of the demon, even though he'd rather go back to punching the wall. He thinks of lazy days in the park, wrapped up against the cold; of quiet interludes at the Ritz, Crowley's face mellowed by candlelight, the flame shimmering in the reflection of his glasses. Two shoes propped up against a doorway.

He says the Words until his throat is dry, and the sounds are almost incomprehensible as noise.

There is nothing, _nothing._

He can't do anything more, he realises dully. His instincts, that little unrelenting part of him, tells him that he just needs to be patient, wait a little longer, that the solution will present itself. But he's been here a long time. He can't tell exactly, but he feels the burden of it, the crawl of weeks, maybe months alone and in the dark. No one is coming and there's nothing more he can do.

“I'm so sorry, my dear,” he whispers ashamed to the darkness.

Exhaustion seeps through him with the lulling false security of hypothermia. He closes his eyes, and allows himself the numbing respite of sleep even if just for a little while.

 

* * *

 

 

Crowley sells his property for far too much money, gives his plants away to a keen horticulturalist who he knows from his trips to Oddbins, and leaves London. The cottage lies empty. He's waiting for Aziraphale to get back.

He never stays in a place for too long. A skimming visit, like a glance around a crowded room, and maybe he's remembered for an ill-suiting smile or for the line of his suit. If he features in the memories of any, it is as background. Humans around him tangle themselves in the knotty threads of their little lives, their short loves, their lingering miseries, and Crowley wanders through like someone walking to get somewhere else and comes to know as an old wound the sensation like he's lived too long.

In a way, it's a lot like the earlier days, when the Earth was newer, just out of the workshop, a little less used, a little less grubby, wiling and tempting and urging as he pleased, taking pride in his workmanship. Regularly bumping into his counterpart doing his own spot of inspiring and thwarting and emboldening. More often than not, they'd find each other eventually. It was always, at least for Crowley, something he looked forward to.

They'd introduce themselves with their new names, new roles, sometimes new faces if one of them had been careless, and then, with a surreptitious gesture, a code of their own devising, they'd find a moment to slip away from watching eyes to have a drink. Aziraphale had always been delightfully uptight about the whole thing, looking under his pomposity like a bookish schoolchild being encouraged to skive off. His guards came down brick by brick, wine by wine, and Aziraphale would speak more freely, more honestly, more boldly, a little more like the Aziraphale he was coming to know.

Amidst the roll of years, a constant.

Everywhere Crowley goes, he asks around. Using fractured pockets and dubious networks of religious cults, Wiccan covens and occult men's clubs convinced they've tapped into the energies of the universe because they've done a bit of chanting, used some incense that did funny things to the eyes if inhaled and got over-excited when one of them saw something misshapen in their morning coffee. Crowley gains a reputation. He's always had one, indeed, had prided himself on it and dedicated many hours to maintaining it. To those in certain circles, he's a serious, well-dressed man with an abundance of secrets. There are sometimes mutterings by the jealous about that prick who wears sunglasses in doors, who does he think he is I mean really, but it's a jealousy tinged with greed and a certain amount of fearful respect. They know that he'll give good money to anyone with information about a particular individual, and people are more than willing to talk for that kind of price, sharing rumour and gossip and guesswork alike with a gimlet-eyed eagerness. And the man who calls himself Mr A. Crowley will nod and pay and follow up every claim of demonic summoning and angelic visitation with an unrelenting commitment that one day, he'll get to the – usually cold and dark basement because all the best guides recommend the ambience – and he'll be there. Tapping his foot impatiently, arms folded but unharmed and whole, a relieved look on his face even as he demands to know exactly what Crowley's been dithering about doing for so long.

One by one, his channels become emaciated, thin out before drying up, and then he moves on.

When he has to, he goes back to his flat of the moment, opulent with pre-selected modern art, and moodily drinks more than he should. He sees in too many mornings, thoughts slippery, taking the same ill-advised turnings, looping like an insect bumping at a window. His thoughts grind down the same grooves, trace the same fears, the same regrets.

It occurs to him, a new corridor of thought behind a previously locked door, as he's trying to pour wine into a tumbler and missing the rim by some inches, that he's desperately, embarrassingly lonely.

It is a foreign sensation, because a second, smaller thought comes limping after the first to remind him that he hasn't really been lonely, since he came to Earth. Not completely. Oh, he'd taken it for granted that those moments outside the still blazing bookshop, the knowledge that he was on his own in the face of the end of the world, that that was the bonafide, certificated real deal when it came to the state of alone-ness, but that abject barrenness is nothing like this. Because Aziraphale, even when they hadn't been friends as such and more remarkably tolerant enemies, had always been stationed here with him. And even if Aziraphale would have rather dined on his bow-tie than admit it, he was in exactly the same rowing boat of existential doubt as Crowley, the same questions leaking in that they stoppered in their own ways. In more modern times, when the Arrangement had settled down, there didn't seem to be any real need to live too far away from each other, not when they were engaging in the same line of business. They'd submerged themselves in this world, and while Crowley had always been better at it, the point was that this living lark wouldn't have been half as fun if he'd done it alone.

He'd never really thought about how much of his love of Earth was tied up with Aziraphale being here as well.

He flits from Ireland to Germany to Slovakia to South Korea. When he sees him, he'll be able to tell him of all the places he searched, the weathered miles, and Aziraphale will look at him fondly, and place a hand on his arm, secretly touched, and they'll be able to laugh about it.

He has to wait a little longer, that's all.

Months are swallowed up by years.

 

* * *

 

The shrill crowing of the buzzer sounds at the nurse's station. Tasha stands up from her swivel chair, leaving her broken-backed book splayed on top of the table, and stretches out with a groan, glancing at the clock before the intercom.

It's Room 12. Probably will be wanting help moving to the bathroom, she thinks.

“Everything alright, Mr Roseley?” she says, all lingering traces of tiredness smoothed out from her voice, twisting the wall light to a low dimness.

Frederick Roseley twists and turns, jerkily, catching himself in the bed linen. His twitching more pronounced at night, his mouth opens and closes and he keens in frustration, trying to drag the words from an unwilling brain. She can't tell if he was trying to get out of bed or has had a nightmare; she wonders if he remembers himself.

“The angel,” he's muttering now. Voice reedy with distress. “Oh, I did... I did such a... terrible, terrible thing...”

He's been a resident here since before Tasha started three years now. Lived alone for a long time, he remembers hearing, as long as he could unassisted until they had to bring him into the hospice. No family, or at least none that he's on speaking terms with. And all that time it's the same loop, coming and going through good days and bad. His hand flounders unsteadily in the darkness, like he's trying to grab something. His arms bony as a baby bird, his skin showing veins like leaves.

“Mr Roseley, there's no need to get all excited,” Tasha says, walking over briskly. He's going to pull his IV out if he's not careful, and she doesn't want to be trying to sort all that out at this hour, not when he's like this.

The old man's hand grabs hers. It's deceptively strong, but it's not a cruel hold, and she waits patiently while his speech struggles through the fog to get to her.

“I was wrong,” he says fervently. “I knew... I knew but I did nothing. It's down there, trapped in the dark. It wanted to go _home_. I was too frightened, I didn't...”

His eyes are heavy with welled-up tears. The milky film of a cataract over his left eye makes his vision blurry, but he stares right at her. It's the most she's ever heard him speak.

“It's OK, Mr Roseley,” she says softly, trying to comfort the crying, shivering man. She pulls his blanket further up, settles him back down, allows him to keep a hold of her hand as she rights the empty glass he's disturbed with his movements, the photo frame with a younger him giving a little girl with a ponytail a piggyback.

“Do you think He'll forgive me?” he whispers hoarsely. His question childlike, his grip spasming with fear. “For such a weakness against one of his own?”

“He will. I'm sure he will,” Tasha says firmly. That seems to have been the right answer, for his breathing begins to slow, his body easing out its tension. He stares in the corner of the room at visions she cannot comprehend.

“Have you ever seen one, Natasha?” he mumbles weakly. There's the limping ghost of a smile on his creased face. “They look like us, but oh, their wings. Their wings...”

It's the last thing he says. His breathing slows to the soft rise and fall of an untroubled sleep, and then it stops entirely.

If he goes above or below, it is not the business of others to know.

 

* * *

 

Aziraphale is nudged suddenly by the itching sensation that something is watching him. He blinks, and sluggishly turns his head from where he's propped himself up against the glass walls.

He tries to speak, but at first it's a hoarse wheeze that scrapes the side of his throat, drags itself out as a grating cough inside.

“Who's there?” he manages to croak, the sound of his own voice unreal to him after so long, peering into the unrelenting darkness.

A little hope in him fumbles with the matches, and thinks _maybe, maybe, maybe._

There is a shape, haloed in a black that shows no stars. Two holes that would hold eyes catch his gaze.

“YOU'VE LOOKED BETTER, SWORDBEARER.”

Fear submerses him in a cold wave, replaced by something that is a sad but accepting relief.

“Azrael,” he breathes out, and no matter how much he does not have the ability, his muscles wasting away, atrophying in this prison, he will not face this sitting. He staggers painfully to standing.

“Have you...” he starts cautiously, “Have you come for...?”

He hadn't wanted to go. Not yet. But it would be better than this, a nothingness compared to this unending, unendurable mockery of living.

“I CAME FOR THE HUMAN,” Death says with the rumble of a motorway overpass, the pile up of a traffic accident. He regards Aziraphale with an unreadable expression, and Aziraphale wonders how he must look. He wonders how long it's been. “HE HAD SOME INTERESTING THINGS TO SAY BEFORE THE END. I WISHED TO SEE IF THE RUMOUR WAS TRUE.”

He levels a stony look at the angel trapped in glass, the tremor in his legs from the effort of standing.

“NO ONE IS COMING, SWORDBEARER.”

Aziraphale doesn't respond for a moment. The words drip onto him like a spillage, like the slow realisation of a paper cut.

“But...” he begins to open his mouth, thinking that no, that's not true, that can't be, _someone_ must find him surely.

“THE ESTATE AND THIS HOUSE WILL FALL INTO RUIN AND DISREPAIR AS DO ALL THINGS,” Death pronounces without emotion, like he's reading off percentages in the stock exchange. “YOU WILL LANGUISH HERE, FORGOTTEN AS THE NAMES OF THE STARS.”

“B...but you could set me free!” Aziraphale insists wildly. The struck match inside him surges into a real flame, and he _wants_ , he wants to live, he wants to get out of here, he wants to see Crowley again. “You have the power! Or you could, I don't know, tell them where I am! Heaven, anyone, they could get me out.”

Even Heaven, he thinks. He'd take the punishments of Heaven, the blistering agony of divine mercy over this.

Death directs a skeletal hand lazily at the ground like he's pointing out a mildly interesting plant. Two of the runes spark-up like bush-fire, illuminated in momentary flame.

“THESE ARE YOUR SHACKLES,” he says. “A LUCKLESS MISTAKE. YOU CANNOT BE FOUND BY ANY WHO SEARCH BECAUSE TO THE UNIVERSE, YOU ARE NOT HERE. YOU ARE A MISSPELT WORD, A DROPPED DIGIT ON A PAGE OF CREATION. YOU ARE A NOWHERE BEING, AND YOU WILL NEVER BE FOUND.”

“You could let me out!” Aziraphale cries insistent. He's using one hand against the glass to steady himself, to meet the awful vacant gaze that promises nothing but more of this.

“IT IS NOT MY JOB.”

“Sod your job!” Aziraphale says heatedly. “You could let me out, or you end this... this no-life, this nothingness, you have that power above all others, and you know it!”

“IT IS TRUE,” Death replies idly, and his eyes burn like the heart of a forge. “I DO NOT WISH IT THEN.”

“Because of...” Aziraphale breathes in a furious breath, a brittle cold that douses the flame at the centre of him, permits something darker, angrier to bloom in its stead. “This is because of the Apocalypse, isn't it? You _lost_ , and because you lost, you won't...”

“YOU CHOSE YOUR SIDE, SWORDBEARER. YOU STOOD WITH THE ANTI-CHRIST AND THE SNAKE OF EDEN.” Death does not smile in the way most would understand it, but his mouth bends into a cruel curve. “YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT HE IS NOT SEARCHING FOR YOU. HE GRIEVED AND THEN HE MOVED ON LIKE THE CHANGE OF SEASONS. YOU HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN.”

Aziraphale pulls himself up. Straightening his back, tugging his shirt to try and un-crumple it. He is tired, so so tired of it all, and his voice is a weak, thready gasp, but he looks into those unforgiving eyes without flinching, his back unbent, his head held high.

“You are a liar,” he says carefully and venemously. His lips are chapped, and his words come out a vicious snake-like hiss. “You were bested by an eleven year old with more sense than any of us. Should the next battle come, I would stand where I stood again, and I would try and drive my sword through your treacherous non-existent heart before the end came. So I would ask you right now to do me the most gracious favour and _fuck off._ ”

He's shivering with fury but his voice doesn't tremble, and his gaze doesn't falter. He wonders if Crowley would be proud of him.

Death's face is motionless for a moment before it carves into a nasty grin.

“FAREWELL THEN, SWORDBEARER,” he says and then he is gone.

Aziraphale stands for a long while. After a time, he uncurls his fists, breathes out the air he's been holding. The shadow he casts is bigger than he is, and some emotion ripples in him like a stone disturbing water. He stares into the blackness.

Something unfurls in him like the flag of some army already defeated.

For the first time in his existence, Aziraphale puts his hand to his mouth and starts sobbing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part III up tomorrow.


	3. Chapter 3

Catherine Roseley doesn't go to the funeral. She's in Europe at the time, mid-way through facilitating an important merger on behalf of her clients. This is not the impediment, her employers would have been more than understanding, insisted on her taking the time off, but she doesn't say anything about it. When she gets a call from the hospice saying her father has passed, she thanks them for taking the time, and then, after a moment, carries on with what she was doing.

She gets the papers in the mail a week later. It's late, and she's at home, a cup of herbal tea cooling by her elbow, the light of the computer a sharp blue. She sits at her desk looking at it for a few minutes, her expression unreadable, before she slices the envelope open with an antique letter opener, and reads the short missive from her father's solicitor.

It details briefly, the circumstances of her father's passing – in his sleep, a sparsely attended funeral – and the condition of the estate he left behind. She isn't surprised to see that her inheritance is scant – she never wanted his money – and that most of the wealth is tied up in their ancestral home and grounds in Wales, a dusty mausoleum she hasn't set foot in since she was eighteen. As his only heir, the house passes to her automatically, but the solicitor attests in precise language that there are strict instructions that come with ownership; the house is bequeathed to her on the insistence that it isn't sold. She scoffs, taps her cigarette against a silver ash-tray. She's gone through more than her usual while reading the printed wording, and the room is misted with smoke.

Inside with the papers is also a letter, addressed to her.

The solicitor, Mrs Lucinda Hughes of Jones, Hughes and Williams, states that her father requested this letter to be delivered to her on his passing. She herself hasn't read it, but she had inferred from her conversations with the deceased that it was a final request of some sort or another, some wrong he wanted to right.

She sits at her desk for a long time. Thinking about the past, about family and responsibility.

She is not her father's legacy. His regrets are his own and she has no need or want of them.

Catherine Roseley responds to the solicitor's letter the next morning, thanking him for getting in touch, acknowledging the state of affairs. She requests that in her absence, the manor be locked up until such a time as she returns to England. The letter from her father she locks unread in a drawer.

 

* * *

 

A long time later, a man called Robert Spring finds the letter while sorting though this mother's things. There are boxes upon boxes of heirlooms and papers, fragments of a long-lived life, making architecturally unsound towers in his spare room. Sorting them is slow going; he stops to take things out that he hasn't seen since infancy, admiring the memory that rings up with a patina of old snapshots of time now vanished.

It's in a box that's been long taped shut with peeling sellotape, the cardboard filthy and its corners battered, moved from one place to another and shoved immediately into the attic. The word 'father's' has been drawn hastily on the lid in marker pen. He slices the top open with some outstretched scissors, his hands already coated with a greyish rinse of dust, and peers inside.

He didn't know much about his grandfather. There'd been some bad blood there, he thinks, and his mother had never wanted to talk about him. He'd asked his dad once, before the divorce, and he'd said he'd gone funny in his last days, rambling about angels and demons and divine vengeance. Looking in the box, Robert can see why.

He flicks idly through the books – real bricks of crabbed handwriting, an antiquarian's wet dream of thick brown coverings and ink-stained marginalia. He considers if they might be worth something. The works that are in languages that he can read declare themselves in typeface lettering on their mildewed front pages to be Grimoires, Volumes of Invocations, Ceremonial Rites to Black Masses, Bestiaries detailing wood-block adorned horrors of the other plane.

Spell-books, huh. He snorts, shaking his head. What a load of bollocks.

Still, he thumbs through, teased by the entertaining day-dream promises of untold riches and unimaginable powers.

The letter is pushed crumpled right down the side, and he frowns when he sees the copper-plate handwriting scrawled in biro on the front: _to my dearest Catherine._

It's unopened, and he rips the top off. A key falls out when he shakes the paper loose from the envelope, and he holds it in his hand, testing the weight.

He sits down to read it on top of still unopened boxes of photo-albums and bubble-wrapped china, his old books and school photos he left in his mum's loft. It's rambling gibberish as expected, Cramped handwriting trailing down at a dedicated slant, but there's something fascinating about its earnest insistency, it's singular focus.

It's a list of apologies that feel far too private for Robert to be reading, an attempt to mend a relationship broken by a conveyor-belt of disappointments and miscommunications from both sides. It's only at the end that it diverges into something that catches his interest.

_I must ask you to do one thing for me, Kathy,_ pleads the letter, the handwriting getting spikier, harder to read. _I know you swore you'd never return to the old house, and that fault lies with me. This key is for the old grain storage, the basement where you used to hide and play when you were younger. I locked it many years ago, fearing what I had trapped inside. Please, Kathy, go back to the house and release it. Be better than me. I understood things too late. I sought to summon a solution to our problems, to bring our family back together, to prolong my life, but instead I allowed another to suffer for my pride..._

The letter goes on like this at some length. It's imaginative, Robert will give him that. He wonders over what his grandfather thinks he summoned. Some demon perhaps, a genie to grant three wishes.

Further down the box, he finds the old man's journals, bound in twine. What starts as an idle leaf through merges into an absorbed fascination, reading the detailed reports on summoning, the methodology and the words, sketches and extensive journal entries on the thing he's apparently locked in the basement.

The angel.

It's ridiculous, Robert knows, and he nervously laughs at himself,standing up and stretching from sitting curved, putting the books away into the box, setting the letter and key on top. After a minute, he pockets the key.

Curiosity shores up in him like the swell of the tide.

 

* * *

 

Without quite knowing why, one day, Robert just leaves. He tells his manager to shove his dead-end job up himself, locks up his poky inner-city flat with its creaky central heating and intermittent boiler leak, and gets the cheapest flight he can afford to the UK. He packs his passport, clothes, paperwork declaring him the legal inheritor of the Roseley Manor, the key his mother had kept for the front door, a pile of mildewy books dragged out of a box, and another smaller key that rust has started to overtake.

He thrums his fingers on the arm-rest and doesn't sleep on the flight.

In his weaker moments, he allows himself to consider what an angel looks like. What it can do. What it could give him.

It takes a long time to travel from Stanstead Airport to Roseley Manor, situated in Carmarthenshire in the Brecon Beacons. The bus drivers don't know it exactly by name, but they follow his hastily sketched directions enough to tell him he needs to get the forty that goes to Carreg Cennen Castle and then there's a number ten every three hours that'll drop him near enough to where he wants to go. Tugging his suitcase off the final bus and finding it long past dusk, Robert finds a B&B just before it's about to close, snagging a single-room vacancy and nodding unheeding as breakfast hours and check-out times are explained to him.

He lies on a paisley patterned duvet quilt and wakes up repeated through the night. First thing in the morning, he walks the two miles out of the village to the Manor.

The place is cold and echoing when he gets inside. Dust-sheets over what little furniture remains, most of the other stuff sold off years ago to pay for hospice care. Putting his suitcase down by the entrance, he hunts giddily for the door to the basement, unable to contain his excitement much longer. When he finally finds it, huddled between the kitchen pantry and a corridor leading into the old parlour, he unlocks it with the rusted key, almost dropping it in his rush.

There are grooved stone steps worn into faint dips that mark the level down, and he moves his hand around, feeling blindly until he finds the iron-wrought banister to steady his way. The banister has been ill-used by the frost and damp of the underground, and paint lacquer flakes off onto his hand before he wipes it on his jeans.

It is cold. He knows he shouldn't be surprised – it's a rainy climb where the house sits, prone to soupy bouts of mist and fog, and the stone diligently refuses to bind any warmth to the room. The space itself is burdened with dust that makes him cough into his sleeve, and there's a faint stink of mould from leaky water pipes that reminds him of his old flat. He finds a light switch after some outstretched fumbling, and the lights hum and groan with a sticky buzz, flicker perilously on and off before they finally settle into a harsh glare, illuminating the room.

Robert breathes in a gasp.

A bubble of glass reflecting the gleam of the light. The floor marked with chalk like an ancient mandala, four plinths and umpteen burnt-out candles surrounding the wide circle.

It's true, he thinks dazedly, a shocked smile beginning to flourish on his face. It's true, all of it. The old bastard was right. All of it, all of it for him, his inheritance, _his_.

He lets out a steadying breath, and takes time to study the form slumped in the centre of the glass bauble. For a second, he panics, his newly gilded dreams wavering as he wonders if it's dead but the more he stares, creeping anxiously closer, the more he can see the faint and slow inhale of breath.

It doesn't look much like an angel. It has the look of a middle-aged university professor. Curled up tightly, its arms crossed over like it's holding itself together. It shivers even in sleep, it's brow creased in a frown like crumpled cotton. There are old imprints of blood against the glass that match the crusted impression on the thing's knuckles, like at some point it's tried to fight its way out. There's not even any wings that he can see.

Robert observes for a few moments before impatience starts to seep in.

“Excuse me?” he says to telegraph his presence, before he tries a bit louder. “Excuse me? Excuse me!”

No movement. He walks around the circumference, and it doesn't even look like the thing's opened its eyes.

Robert huffs and walks carefully across the circle. He knows where he can't step, where a foot would disturb the chalk lines. He wore those books of his grandfather's out through reading, and he's been doing some research of his own to prepare for this moment.

He stands in front of the glass, admiring the principle of his possession if not the actual thing itself, before he knocks loudly against the side.

“Wake up!”

That gets the thing's attention. It stirs in a jolting, pained start, groggy and confused, before it makes a high grating sound in its throat that echoes too loudly in the small room, pressing its hands against its eyes, burying its head in its hands to try to block out the light.

It takes a good ten minutes before the thing's eyes are able to adjust, faster than a human would have, its forehead scrunched up like a migraine. It struggles to move itself up to sitting, its arms next to useless, quaking with the effort. Robert expected better to tell the truth. He'd imagined magnificent angelic wings, a powerful and imperious figure he could reason with, he could use to channel his own will. The thing is a pale, thin creature, wan and sallow from sun-less decades, wearing a faded check shirt with long sleeves pulled down, gingham trousers and sensible socks – its shoes thrown to the other side of the circle. Short hair gleams almost bone white in the darkness of the room.

Robert only takes a step back when the creature fixes its gaze on him. Pupils blown wide from the light, watery eyes dulled over as though a knife gone blunt. The dullness is beginning to recede slowly like fog on glass, replaced with something hollow and dark like the bottom of a well.

The thing stares at him, and Robert begins to smile.

“Would you look at you?” he marvels softly. “Old grandad was right about you, angel.”

Robert has the inexplicable sensation of someone looking right through him as one would look through a window.

“You've been down here a long time, huh,” Robert says. He straightens and flashes his best sales-pitch smile. “That's all going to end. I've come to make a deal with you.”

Only silence follows, but he has the angel's attention that's for sure. He pulls together the speech he's rehearsed, trying to appear confident.

“I've been doing a lot of reading,” he says, “and I don't think you told my grandfather the truth. You told him you couldn't cure him, didn't you, but see, you're an _angel_. You can do whatever you want. You can give me whatever I want. And if you do, well, I can look into making things more comfortable for you. Perhaps, in time, I'll send you home. You want to go home, don't you?”

The angel's gaze becomes a little harder, and he has the prickling feeling inching up his spine that the thing knows he's lying about that last part. He tamps down his nerves.

“Don't you want to make a deal?” Robert urges. “Know what I want?”

The angel stares mutely for a moment. It looks him over like a Saville Row tailor, face shuttered up, and he can't meet its gaze before turning away. After a moment, it has seemed to see all it needs to. It turns around and lies back down. It's as clear a dismissal as Robert could get. He is hit with the strong impression that, were the angel the type to do such things, it would have given him the finger and loaded the gesture with much the same sentiment.

His face heats up in embarrassment, shame quickening in his gut. He slams his hands on the glass.

“Hey!” he says angrily, his eyes beginning to well with furious tears. “Don't you ignore me! Don't you get it, you're mine now. You're here, you belong to me, and you'll do what I tell you, ok?”

Nothing.

He slams his hand down again.

“Fine,” he snarls at the curved back. “Be like that. I'll find another way to convince you, just you watch.”

He stomps out of the room, slamming the light switch off as he goes.

 

* * *

 

The quirks of the universe are many and no-one has had the time or the comprehension of putting them into words. This moment, like every, is a coarse briar-patch of possibility. That Aziraphale will be found or not found, that Crowley will rescue him or not. There are draft versions that end in triumph and vindication, dramatic rescues and come-uppances doled out accordingly, tearful reunions or arrivals that come moments too late. The universe does not play favourites, and is not invested one way or another.

As it is, that night there is a thunderstorm. The worst for centuries. A red weather warning goes out across the area, snarling gales uproot trees and topple power lines. Rains come in clattering rounds that quickly swell into flooding.

Roseley Manor is an old house. Years of disrepair have left stretch-marks of winters, the central heating system freezing and unfreezing, and a small drip starts from under the living room. Misused pipes groan and creak, and then burst.

Down to the basement, water trickles.

He hasn't slept since Roseley's grandson arrived. It's a sick and thankless gift of Aziraphale's Grace to be able to see into the hearts of men. Roseley had been a frightened man, weak and cowardly in his human way, scared by his own mortality and grasping for more life. Aziraphale's sense of angelic mercy doesn't extend very far these days, but in a way, he doesn't blame him. Oh, he holds it as a grudge, permits the bitterness to fester in him, but Roseley was human, too human, and he can't exactly hold him accountable for that.

And after years in the dark and the silence, the universe sends him this one to taunt him with deliverance. Greedy for things he hasn't worked to deserve, his entitlement weathered hard by life's shortcomings, thinking the world owes him something. He wants power and recognition, he's petulant and childish, and he does not like being ignored. Aziraphale's silences and lack of acknowledgement enrage him, and he fantasises viciously about pulling the angel's feathers out one by one, listening to him plead and promise him everything for a reprieve. Aziraphale can see it play out behind his eyes, a vindictive little revenge for his humiliation, and he keeps his eyes closed and mouth shut, almost wanting the silence back.

Mostly he wants it all to end.

Aziraphale has decided that whether the man succeeds or not, he's not going to utter a word. It's a pride of a sort, a dogged spite, but it's a minor sin to succumb to in the face of everything.

The water runs down the mould-spattered walls, trickles in ever widening streams across the concrete floor. It eats away at the chalky outlines, dissolves the salt and laps against the glass barrier.

Quietly, it washes away the two runes that have kept Aziraphale here these long long years.

The soft lull of Aziraphale's powers should feel like a warmth spreading into the chill of his bones. But it's been many years of starved limitation, of a cruel void where there should be Grace, and the infusion sparks and lights up like a petrol doused rag, and it's like he's _burning_. He gasps airlessly, flails, wailing as the pain punches deeper, not sure what's happening, confused and frightened and wondering what _now_ , what _else_ does he have to give that hasn't already been taken. He cries out loud and wants not to be alone, wants this all to stop, to go away, wants to be free.

His fumbling powers obey. The glow of a brief, yearning, blinding connection illuminates the glass like a flash-bang explosion.

And then there is a roaring boom, a forceful shockwave of power that explodes outwards decimating nearby grassland, an impact that crumbles rock and batters stone and brings his whole cruel prison crashing down around him.

 

* * *

 

The circle he once drew in the glass was worse for wear. The symbols scuffed, half-flaked, dried against the glass.

Aziraphale didn't say the Words. He didn't have them, wouldn't have been able to dredge them up through his terror.

But the circle does its job. It's equipment faulty and the line bad, for the brief stumble of time between Aziraphale's outburst and the house caving in, it _connects_.

To people walking in the early morning commute that overcast day, the man walking past in dark clothes and dark glasses drops like his strings have been cut.

Crowley's mouth twists open in an empty sound, the noise robbed from him. He feels something collide into him, violently, heedlessly, and there is a clamour of messy impressions, relentless sensations that drop into his brain like a headrush. There's nothing gentle about it, and when it recedes, he feels a little as though someone's just chucked his brain into a blender. He's gasping raggedly, fumbling for his lost glasses on the pavement, and some people have stopped, are trying to help, more than one person half-starting to call an ambulance.

Crowley struggles to his feet, knots up every mobile signal for a mile and bolts.

He's on the first flight back to the UK within the hour.

 

* * *

 

He left the Bentley in London, and he doesn't even consider making a frantic detour to grab it. He gets off the flight, legs it to the car rental booth and has the man convinced he's looking at perfectly filled out and legal documentation. Then he gets in the car, starts the engine and hares off to Wales.

The thunder-strike of contact gave him a general idea of where he should be going, but as he gets closer, worry starts to churn in his gut like a particularly vindictive tumble-dryer, doubting the splintered giddy impression he got, desperately trying to ransack his recollection for the clues left scattered. As he broaches the Brecon Beacons and Carmarthenshire, it turns out it's not going to be a problem. The gale-force wind and the overbearing rain doesn't exactly point him in the right direction, that's a regular Welsh weekday; no, what he can sense but the humans can't is that out in the distance is an outburst of divine emotion like the centre of a battlefield, like the last bloody hurrah of an out-manned battalion going down playing dirty. The closer he gets, the harder it is to focus, feeling the waves pushing him back relentlessly and he tightens his hands on the steering wheel and ignores every demonic intuition that tells him he's wandering into a fight he should really be nobly retreating from sharpish.

There's only one person who could be at the centre of it.

The rain is squalling hard, striking the wind-screen, and he misses the turning more than once, feeling the tires threaten to skid in the mud. There's little or no landmarks to follow, a confusion of hedgerows and stone fencing, and the car almost gets stuck down a muddy road before he slams his hands on the dashboard and curses and the car sorts itself out with an apologetic engine rev. The maelstrom he's nearing makes him feel dizzy and blinded, like he's staring at a lightbulb and can't close his eyes.

He's become aware he's muttering under his breath. Urging the car on, damning the wind and the rain, and wordlessly, caught only as the snarled wool of his thoughts, is an asking to someone, _someone,_ for this to be it.

He sees the charred, shattered remains of the manor as he takes the next bend, and he thinks, sickeningly, of a bookshop burning, of a crackling storm.

It looks like a hurricane came through here and invited friends. Crowley drives as close as he can, then grasps at the door latch and stumbles out, his shoes catching in the muddy slick, staggering up to the half-collapsed ruins, his head bowed from the effort. The skeletal foundation of load-bearing columns and cross-beams sway uneasily. The house is sunken in on itself, torn from the foundations up and out, the aftermath of the equivalent of a divine landmine.

Crowley's wiping the rain from his face, forcing his way through the nausea, the twisting sensation in his gut, shouting over and over. Competing with the growl of the wind and determined to win.

“Aziraphale! Aziraphale!”

He's screaming it as he upends ashen ceiling beams, wades through the fragmented glass windows, kicks asides fire-ruined heirlooms. He's struggling to understand how anyone managed to survive this. There's no sound except for his shouting, the howl of the storm in this desolate, wind-scoured place. He continues shouting, and there's an anger now, a furious desperation that breaks its banks in him. Because they deserve a happy ending, don't they, they have as much of a right as these humans do to try and be happy, and he's not always been the best, but he's tried his hardest, harder than some, and he hasn't given up, not once, _not once_ in all these lonely, terrible years and that must count for something, that must mean _something._ He's never asked for much, but he wants _this_ , only this, only this, just this once.

“Aziraphale!” he roars over the wrecking wind. “Aziraphale!”

A flash of something almost-white, half-buried, ragged as cloth.

Crowley on all fours before his legs can buckle, clawing at collapsed brick and beams, pushing them away, scrabbling to make room, cutting his hands on the glass splintered around him.

Aziraphale.

The angel's wings are sodden with the rain, greyed and marred with soot and ash, splayed awkwardly over brickwork and concrete blocks. His body is on its side, and he's not moving. Crowley's hands run shakily over a half-ruined shirt – and it's the same, it's the same shirt he last saw him in, like he hasn't been gone at all, like all these years have receded into nothing. He wipes the angel's hair back from his face, leaning over him to shield him from the rain.

The maelstrom wails amidst the storm. A roar of divine terror that saps at his strength.

“Angel,” he says, gritting his teeth with the effort. “Aziraphale, you need to calm down... I can't... You need to help me, Aziraphale.”

He presses his forehead against the angel's, cradles both sides of his face with his hands, his body bent over him like the bough of a tree.

“Come on,” he urges desperately, “You can do this...Come on, come on, open your eyes, _please._ ”

Aziraphale's eyes open slowly. They look around with a dullness, a flat confusion.

“That's it,” Crowley says, and a small encouraging smile starts to break on his face, “You're doing good. I'm here, just stay with me.”

The maelstrom begins to weaken, uncertain and fragile. Fades until the angel's eyes flicker half-closed again. Crowley sways, half slumped with exhaustion, and fights to retain his balance.

Aziraphale breathes shallowly and lies still, looking for all the world like he's waiting for it to end out here.

Crowley has not waited this long to watch the angel discorporate in front of him.

“Get up!” he presses, trying to gather the angel in his arms, tugging at him to stand. “Get up, come one, get up, it's pissing it down, come on, don't you dare bloody die on me now.”

Crowley growls and hoists him upright, willing for him to stand, doubtful he has the strength to get both of them out of here. Aziraphale's legs go right under him and Crowley's almost dragged over from holding on, and he curses enraged, the rain making it almost impossible to see through his glasses, and after a moment he's yanked them off and thrown them to the side. Crowley doesn't know if Aziraphale's hurt, if there's injuries he can't see, he doesn't know anything except he's here and they need to get out of here right bloody yesterday.

He swears again, and thinks sod it, and then he's pulling Aziraphale uncomfortably up onto his back, a laughable parody of a piggyback, the angel lolling boneless and dead-weight, arms dangling and wings dragging like a filthy bridal train. He's not as heavy as Crowley would have thought. Crowley half-slips down the hill, gripping his charge tightly to him, his steps wavering, his body telling him that this is just one more thing on the list of bad ideas he's asked it to consider, and he sets his jaw, just one more step, almost there. It takes almost a minute for his strained hands to open the passenger door of the car before he's leaning forward and they're both collapsing onto the front seat.

The passenger seat shouldn't be able to accommodate the both of them but it seems inclined to today.

Aziraphale lies half-sat from where he's fallen. He's soaked through, bedraggled, his shirt stuck to his skin, his socks squelching on the carpet. His hair drips rainwater into his eyes, his face specked with soot and tiny glass cuts long stopped bleeding.

Now he's here, now he's _finally_ here, Crowley is reticent to touch him. He reaches out and carefully takes a hold of the angel's frozen hand. Aziraphale twitches at the contact, if anything, draws himself up tighter, half jerking to pull away. He's pale, like a plant deprived of sunlight. His eyes scatter around like nervous snooker balls, and they move without taking anything in.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says earnestly (a little more scared, a little less certain) and Aziraphale doesn't respond for a long unyielding moment. When he finally meets Crowley's eyes properly, there's a hard un-recognising look to them. His expression ground down, hollowed out into a bitter emptiness. Crowley's not sure he even knows he's there.

His confusion graduates with honours into a mature fear. He forces himself to stay calm.

Crowley gestures slowly, not wanting to shock the angel, and the water drains off him like the rivulets of streams before dissipating into nothing. He materialises a blanket and throws it over Aziraphale, tucking it around him, wondering if he's cold, panicking because he shouldn't be, he's an angel, and knowing nothing about what's happening here, understanding nothing, terrified he's doing the wrong thing.

Crowley becomes aware he's a minute away from babbling with apologies, letting them all tumble out of him. His thoughts are a near-hysterical scatter of sorries; sorry I took so long, sorry I wasn't faster, sorry I let you down.

Aziraphale's hands fist against the blanket. He looks washed-out like an overexposed photograph. Feverish.

Crowley can't do this here. He can't do this now.

He'll fall apart later but right now, that's not the most important thing.

“I'm going to drive us away now,” Crowley says to Aziraphale slowly and gently. “We'll go to a hotel, and then we'll... we'll figure this out. We'll sort this out together.”

Aziraphale's gaze is loosening. He blinks, and his eyes are a watery blue. With a grinding slowness, he stares at Crowley as through struggling through a mist. A frown is beginning to crown his forehead.

After a long time, he swallows and nods. Something trembles in his gaze.

That's enough for Crowley. It needs to be.


	4. Chapter 4

Crowley's current understanding of what to do has become a sketchily drawn Venn diagram by someone who has had the concept of circles explained to them. On the left, and currently possessing his entire attention and a badly-paved motorway system of thought-processes, is to take whatever has been done to Aziraphale and do whatever he can to fix it. This part of his comprehension is running around like a company secretary faced with a flaming filing cabinet, and questions jostle to be at the front of the queue. He doesn't understand where Aziraphale's been, why he has heard nothing for _decades_ and then gets punched in the brain with the call to go to Wales. Why Aziraphale's quiet and shaky with a delirious, overwhelmed expression like a blown bulb's gone off in him.

A smaller hind-brain in charge of the shrunken right circle grows fathomless and hungry, momentarily dismissed as Not Now; in this, thoughts of finding whoever is responsible and enacting something distastefully demonic upon them slither and gnaw like frostbite. In the centre, a match held against the black, is the far off promise of a life as it was before.

Crowley's present world has trimmed down to the essentials. He drives through the rain, searching for a hotel. The wind-screen wipers aren't doing their job because the rain isn't even daring to touch the car. It's only mid afternoon, but the sky is slate grey and bitter.

Crowley keeps sending anxious looks over to the passenger seat. Aziraphale sits, his eyes fixed on the window, watching the scenery leaping past with a disinterested lifeless glance. Crowley frets and wonders if he should make conversation, wondering what he should say, wondering what he _can_ say.

The hotel they find has a spare room. Indeed, they're under the assumption that this room has been rented for the foreseeable future in the name of a Mr A Crowley + one, already paid for in advance, and the staff at the desk don't ask about the lack of bags or the fact that Mr A. Crowley is half-carrying his pale, muddy and sick-looking guest, or that under the lumpy blanket around the friend's shoulder, two wings are hunched. The thoughts that pass over their glazed minds as they hand him the room key card are submerged by a hundred other inconsequential considerations, and Crowley is careful to keep it that way.

Crowley was planning, feeling his legs stagger coltishly beneath him, to take the lift up to the fifth floor. But it is here that he finds his first hurdle to trip over; Aziraphale takes one look at the sheer metal doors sliding open, revealing the carpeted and mirrored space within, and will not budge. Crowley tries coaxing initially but the mask of this is quickly pulled off to reveal a Bad Idea. Aziraphale's eyes have gone almost comically wide, and a gleam of panic strikes in them like light off a rolling marble. He presses his lips so tight they pale bloodless and shakes his head and he grips onto Crowley's sleeve with irregular and bitten-down nails.

His intensity scares him. It shrivels up the edges of his frustration and makes them crisp up cold instead. Crowley gets reacquainted with the icy sensation clogging at the bottom of his spine. He doesn't understand. It's like someone thrust a map into his hands and didn't mark where the landmines were buried. He doesn't know why Aziraphale suddenly looks like one of those animals who will bite their own limbs off to escape from traps, why his eyes are so empty, why he's so silent, why, why, why.

The honest truth is that Crowley doesn't trust himself to be able to fix this. He's not good with other people's emotions. Comfort and reassurance and knowing just what to say, they're not in his nature. But it's only them now. Aziraphale has no one else to help.

Crowley breathes out through his nose.

Slow steps.

“We'll take the stairs,” he says, and Aziraphale's hold loosens. Steering towards the stairwell, they make the journey laboriously. Aziraphale doesn't let go of his sleeve. He's moved closer, anchoring himself against him, and Crowley knows how he feels.

They get inside the room with no trouble from the card reader, the lights clicking in automatically and Crowley immediately locks the door. Striding forward, he checks the windows, pulls the curtains across. He feels like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop, for this to have been too simple, a trap of some kind, as though something will come and claim Aziraphale from him again.  
Aziraphale stands unsteadily where he stopped in the narrow hallway, his wings tucked away. His face streaked with mud and dust. His gaze focused on the cheap carpeted floor, his jaw tight.

Crowley wants to sleep, wants nothing more than to curl up around Aziraphale and clock out for a decade or so. He touches Aziraphale's arm, and there's a flinch but not as strong as before. Aziraphale's hand goes to hold onto the hem of Crowley's mud-adorned jacket.

Slow steps, he tells himself.

“Aziraphale,” he says quietly. He waits for – wants so much his body strains for it – a reply. A word.

“OK,” he says, maintaining the same feather-light tone. “Aziraphale. I know this is hard for you. And I don't understand why, but we'll get there. We'll sort this together. So try, for me. Just a nod or a shake of the head if you don't feel up to talking. Can you do that for me?”

A scraping pause. Aziraphale's eyes travel up and meet his. And that's almost worse, a sunless gaze that casts no warmth because it's nothing like what he remembers, feels he's been cheated by his recollections.

Aziraphale nods heavily.

“OK,” Crowley says. “First thing's first. Do you have any injuries?”

A faint slow shake.

“Do... Do you know what's happening?”

A pause, a nod.

“Do you remember me?”

Something strikes like flint in those eyes. Aziraphale's gaze trembles but he doesn't look away. His hand clenches tighter on the fist-full of cloth he has in his hold.

A nod.

“OK. Good. Do you want something? A shower, something to eat, I don't know, a cup of tea? I think they've got those awful travel kettles in here that make the water all limescaly...”

Aziraphale's getting that struck look again, overwhelmed by choice.

“Scratch that,” Crowley says quickly. “OK. Do you want some food?”

A wavering silence as the gears crank in Aziraphale's head. Finally, a shake.

“A shower?” Crowley asks, feeling dirty and like he's been bog-diving himself, and the angel nods.

Crowley assumes he'll want his privacy, but when he moves to leave Aziraphale sort himself out, the angel won't let go of his shirt. He looks at the glass cubicle and his expression dips into the same bolt of fear as the lift.

“Together?”

A nod.

Crowley finds himself standing in the shower cubicle fully clothed. The clothes are more an extension of himself so it's pretty much the same. It's not a space designed for two, and the water-spray is starting to flood the bathroom tiles because Aziraphale made a sharp noise in his throat when Crowley went to close it and Crowley quickly added that noise to the list of things he never wants to experience again.

Aziraphale's human form is not emaciated or sickly, but he is smaller, thinner. He's lost the roundness that he spend years of dedicated comfort padding his body with. He takes up less space even in the way he holds himself. Crowley carefully rubs shampoo and conditioner through the angel's hair, cleans his feathers of dust and soot. There are rusted reddish marks on Aziraphale's knuckles, and Crowley frowns, the questions pushing in behind his teeth but he wipes the skin clean with the hotel-provided sponge and says nothing.

He starts speaking as he turns the shower off, gestures the water out of his clothes, manifests comfortable clothes around Aziraphale's form that don't suit him in the way his own style did but are warm and fit nonetheless. He talks softly but continually like the patter of night-time rain on a dark window. Aziraphale isn't saying anything, but he's listening and it seems to be unwinding something in him.

There's one bed in the hotel and Crowley sits himself down with his back against the headboard, pulls Aziraphale carefully to sit back between his legs. It's not so far from the old days when Crowley would throw his legs over the angel's lap when he landed on the sofa next to him, and Aziraphale would sigh and adjust his book but place a hand on his ankles anyway as he carried on reading.

Crowley goes quiet, but Aziraphale seems to become agitated at that, beginning to stiffen again, so he continues talking. The angel won't settle back against him, a watchful tension to his body like he won't let himself sleep, so Crowley sits up to drape himself over Aziraphale's back, wrapping his arms around in a loose hug.

“You should sleep,” he says against the angel's hair.

Aziraphale shakes his head, more fervently than before. Crowley can't see his expression but he can imagine it.

“I'll stay,” Crowley says. “I'll be right here. I promise.”

There are sounds outside, a loud drunken jeer, a clunk of something dropped, and Aziraphale starts, pushes back against Crowley like he's trying to bury himself back under that rubble. Crowley shushes him, and holds him tighter and wonders _why, why, why._

Eventually as the sunset starts to splinter through the blinds, Aziraphale's body droops into sleep. Crowley stays awake for another couple of hours, settling them to a more comfortable position. Lying there as the day starts to creep into night, staring at Aziraphale, taking in every line he doesn't recognise, the heaviness like a pall that shrouds his face. His mind a-swarm, full of things he doesn't understand.

He falls asleep frowning, and wakes up two days later to the sound of next door's TV.

Aziraphale stays asleep for another week.  


* * *

 

Aziraphale wakes up suddenly at around three in the morning. Crowley knows this because the angel opens his eyes in the dark room, clenches them shut again in panic, and explodes the lightbulb in a localised shower of glass over their bed in his frantic effort to illuminate the room. There's a cry, pushing out of his throat like a sob. Crowley's got the bulb sorted and reformed almost instantly, the buzz of electricity as the light beams on, and he's moving back over to the bed from where he was rifling in the cupboards.

“Hey,” he says, trying to calm him down. “It's OK, look, you're here, you're OK. The light's on.”

Crowley carefully gets back on the bed and lies down, a hands-space between them. He mirrors the angel's body with his.

Aziraphale looks right at him, looking wrecked and exhausted even now.

“I'm here,” Crowley repeats, insistent.

A war seems to be going on behind Aziraphale's tight expression, reinforcements being drafted to support his shattered nerves. Crowley keeps quiet, his glasses off, looking back non-confrontationally, and watches as cracks begin to appear in his defences. It would be a lie to say his waiting is patient, but this isn't something to rush.

Aziraphale's hand twitches, tightening by his side before his short fingers start unclenching. After a minute, he reaches forward ever so tentatively, sets it trembling over where Crowley's heart would be. He jumps at the contact, as though he wasn't expecting to find anything there.

Aziraphale's wintry gaze starts giving way to something a little more familiar.

The hand drifts over to Crowley's shoulder, testing each expanse of skin and cloth. Crowley doesn't interrupt, indeed, struggles to recall how to regularly breathe and blink as the shaking hand ghosts up his neck, cups his face.

 Aziraphale's eyes are wet.

“ _You're here._ ”

It isn't a question but it's easily desperate enough to be. His voice is calloused and it quakes like something locked out in a storm.

Crowley folds his hand over Aziraphale's, holding it against his face.

“I'm here,” he says.

Aziraphale's eyes take in everything he can see with wide, skittish eyes weighed down by doubt. After a moment, he presses his forehead against Crowley's and they remain motionless there like two ships run aground.

The gulf of years lie as a snowfall along their path.

“Where were you, Aziraphale?” Crowley finally asks. “Where did you go?”

Haltingly, shortly, Aziraphale tells him.

 

* * *

 

No one laid a hand on Aziraphale. No one hurt his physical body, he wasn't harmed by anything that left a scar on his skin, and maybe that's what makes the next stages so hard. Because Aziraphale can miracle away broken bones and injuries, his body a well lived-in vessel for his angelic essence but ultimately a human-shaped case for his true nature inside, but he can't snap his fingers and will this all away. Neither of them can.

All the battles are staged in his head, ingrown fears and scuttling terrors being shown the light. Crowley has to learn the new rules quickly. Darkness is a no-go. Aziraphale checks and unchecks the windows to make sure he can open them. Crowley tries to get Aziraphale to eat something, hoping it will bring him back to himself with some of his old pleasures, but he takes one bite of a slice of buttered toast and vomits for the first time in nearly a hundred and fifty years. They stick to water and weak tea after at. And every time Crowley thinks they're making some headway, when Aziraphale gives him a look like he used to, there's something else to send him back to that room, some shadow that reminds him of those silent years in the dark.

Aziraphale has never been patient. He's a drumming-fingers, tapping-foot kind of impatient, little huffs and exaggerated looks at his wristwatch. And now, his words struggle through an arduous sea to communicate the most basic expressions. He tries to read to occupy the long hours, short trashy books left in the hotel bedside table by previous occupants, but his focus wanders, his attention span shot, and he slams the pages shut in irritation and stews in his distress. He gets frustrated quickly, angry at himself, at being so incapable of leaving that dark room behind him. He snaps at Crowley when he tries to help, an annoyance bubbling up from a place of shame, and he'll go frosty and silent and refuse to speak.

Yet even his capacity in this has been pared down; his annoyance will pass as a thundercloud, and Aziraphale will mutter hoarse shameful sorries, barely able to meet Crowley's eyes, his taut, helpless mood lingering for hours, embarrassed, wrapped in self-pity and enraged for being so.

“This will pass,” Crowley promises as he holds Aziraphale in a loose hug. They touch more than they used to before. Aziraphale was never distant, but his contact was limited to fingers brushing his arm, gentle pats, a nudge of the shoulder. It was always Crowley throwing his arms around his shoulders as they staggered drunk, planting his legs over the angel's lap when he read. He supposes decades of having had no one will make anyone touched starved. Crowley thinks they both need this right now, this grounding. “It will pass.”

Aziraphale doesn't believe him yet, but he will one day.

Slow steps, Crowley tells himself.

 

* * *

 

They stay in the hotel for a long time. If Aziraphale's honest, and that's all he's doing these days, it's because he's scared to leave. He's scared of a lot of things outside these walls. Big crowds of people overwhelm him, new faces unsettle him and he struggles to maintain a conversation and remain polite. The hotel room is a known space, safe, and he'd never have to leave here.

He can see Crowley tiring of it quickly. Pacing the limited room, wanting to go out for walks to stretch his legs but not wanting to leave Aziraphale alone for too long. Aziraphale feels like a weight around his ankles, and it makes the shame flare up worse.

“I wouldn't...” he begins falteringly one day as he watches Crowley have a disagreement with the room kettle. “I wouldn't.... if you.... You don't have to stay.”

Crowley looks at him. He doesn't wear his glasses, not around him, so Aziraphale can see his pupils dilate slightly, the ramrod motion of his back like standing to attention, the sudden sweep of intensity on his face.

“Do you... Do you want me to leave?” he says. He's trying not to sound hurt, and that's all Crowley's doing at the moment. Trying to carry them both through this, trying to comfort him, to say the right things, and Aziraphale hates it, he hates it, because Crowley shouldn't have to, that's not his burden, it's not fair.

“No,” Aziraphale says, his voice beginning to get coloured with frustration. His words never work the way he wants them to any more, and he fiddles with his fingers. “No, what I mean.... I wouldn't... I wouldn't blame you. If you wanted to go.”

He doesn't want Crowley to go. But if that's what he wanted, what would make him happy, he'd let him.

He gnaws at his lip and picks at his nails and powers through. He was never as strong as Crowley. Crowley who waited all those years, who never gave up. Aziraphale knows, with tendrils of shame are creeping in the foundations of this thoughts, that he didn't have that faith. He didn't think Crowley had forgotten him, but he never thought he'd find him either.

“I... I'm not... .I'm not as I was, Crowley. I don't know how long I'll....” His jaw snaps shut and he feels his eyes starting to get wet and he blinks fiercely and won't look at Crowley. “You don't have to wait. You aren't... you aren't obligated....”

 _We never promised each other anything,_ are the things he doesn't say. _We both had plans but things change, people change, and I wouldn't blame you._

“Aziraphale,” Crowley sounds ruffled, his honour offended, “You really think so little of... You....”

Maybe he sees something on Aziraphale's face. Aziraphale doesn't know.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, low. He's stepped forward, the kettle abandoned. His long fingers circle the angel's arm. “You're an idiot.” His voice weakens to a tenderness. “You think after fifty years of waiting, of _wanting_ you back, I wouldn't wait another fifty?” He sighs, and there's a lot of things unsaid in that. “Aziraphale, I'm not... I'm not good with all this. But however long this takes, whatever you need, we're together. And that's all I wanted. And you'll get through this. You are the most stubborn pig-headed being I've ever known, and maybe it's not ok today, and maybe it's not tomorrow, but it will be. I promise."

Crowley's faith is like looking at the sun for too long. And Aziraphale wants to believe him, he wants to do more than just survive what was done to them. 

Crowley's here. He's not leaving. So Aziraphale can try, for his sake.

It will be, he thinks, letting his head fall against Crowley's shoulder, feeling fingers thread in his hair. It will be. 

 

* * *

 

Aziraphale had mentioned, almost as a coda tagged onto the end of those unending years, the arrival of a man. The grandson of Frederick Roseley. Aziraphale hadn't said much about him, had preferred to skip through that part entirely, but Crowley had been able to read between the lines.

Aziraphale sleeps a lot these days, easily tired by the effort of being back in the world, and while he sleeps, Crowley goes looking.

The people in the nearby village where Crowley found the angel don't have much to say about the odd stranger who'd come all those months back. Young man, inheritor of the estate. One of the older men, sat marinated in pipe smoke, makes some quiet grumble about the suspiciousness of it all. Shows up, struts around for a bit, and next the house is destroyed mysteriously and the young man's legged it. Someone mutters something about insurance fraud. There is a general chorus of knowing agreement. Crowley thanks them for their time, and keeps looking.

Crowley finds him hiding out in a cheaply rented student flat two cities away. He's boarded the windows up and dead bolted the doors, but Crowley dissipates them like water vapour and steps inside. It's the middle of the night, and he's chosen the time deliberately. Something in the lizard-part of the human mind gets unnerved by the hour, sees shapes stretch where they shouldn't, reads rooms with too many corners or corners full with something uninvited. And Crowley wants him to be frightened.

Robert Spring hasn't slept peacefully for weeks, and it shows. He has a beard beginning to overgrow on his face, his eyes wild, his flat stinking like he hasn't left or showered in days.

Crowley drapes himself in shadow, enjoying the theatrics, the cat-and-mouse thrill of it, and something in him too dark for Heaven wants to sink its teeth in.

When the man opens his eyes, he's paralysed. He struggles but the only part of his body that shifts are his eyes, bulged in fear. Crowley enjoys the sight like the swill of wine at the bottom of a glass.

He's dressed in a monstrous form. Writhing and hissing, his scaled wings scraping the ceiling, setting the light-fitting swinging maniacally.

“Robert Ssssping,” he hisses with a mouth too full of teeth.

Crowley didn't have any plans, coming here. He'd wanted revenge, something to hurt that could assuage his own pains, something to lash out against for the wrong done him. Spring came into the story too late, but Crowley will take what he can get.

He meant to toy with him, to scare him enough to know he'd never be a threat again, but Crowley takes in the rot in his heart, reads like a newspaper advert what the man had wanted from Aziraphale, what he would have done to get it, how much he would have made the angel hurt, and it stokes some frozen fire within him. Crowley does not have to be merciful. He doesn't owe this stranger a second chance. That is Aziraphale's burden, not his.

“You could have set him free,” he hisses, and he enjoys the whimper that crawls out of that gagged throat. “You could have been merciful, but you weren't. I am not obligated to be either.”

He reaches into the man's head, weaves a spider's cocoon of nightmares that will lurk even in the brightest sunlight. He will never know peace or rest, his sleeping moments slick with an oil-spill of horrors, flashes of what awaits him in the afterlife. He doesn't lay a finger on the man, but he doesn't have to.

Crowley leaves as a shadow, and returns back to Aziraphale where he belongs.

 

* * *

 

It takes weeks, but the first real success is when Crowley gets Aziraphale to leave the hotel. Holding onto his arm, putting on a brusque brave face like he's squaring up for a fight. The hotel is in the town centre, and they take a walk through the Welsh market-town. The first visit is short and slow, but as the days grow longer, so do the outings.

It is on one of these outings that Crowley spots them.

Preferring to be outside, Crowley has grabbed a sun-speckled table outside a cafe for him and Aziraphale. They'd sat down earlier, taking advantage of the morning rays, and Crowley had ordered a coffee and an earl grey with milk. The cafe had been initially surprised to find they stocked earl grey, but now they make it in a stainless steel tea-pot that leaks through the spout and a slightly chipped cup that's seen better days. Crowley's coffee is persuaded that it's better for the both of them if it adapts into something a little more palatable.

The morning's dipped cooler, the warmth lined with a chill breeze, and Aziraphale pulls his coat tighter around himself and sips carefully at his tea, blowing on it to cool. He's added half a teaspoon full of sugar and it's agreeing with him. Crowley idly stirs his own coffee and comments about whatever comes into his head; people-watching, plans for the afternoon. Aziraphale sometimes picks up the shiftless skein of this conversation but seems more content for Crowley to fill the silences and briefly interject when the mood takes him. Crowley had ordered a cake to come with the tea out of habit. Aziraphale has taken a crumbly fork-full, apparently more to please Crowley than from an actual desire, and the rest of the cake sits untouched by his elbow. His thin sallowness is slowly losing ground to a rounding of his edges, a rosy touch to his cheeks, and it makes Crowley inordinately self-satisfied to see so. The sun is lightening the shadows on his face, and Aziraphale's eyes are content as Crowley spins a tale about something or other he'd done in the sixteenth century.

“You're an incorrigible liar,” Aziraphale interrupts softly.

“'s true! As I live and breathe!”

“You don't need to breathe,” Aziraphale responds, a glow of that old fire.

“Details, angel,” Crowley dismisses with a wave of his hand.

Aziraphale tuts and shake his head, sipping his tea. He's growing his hair out longer, and tight ringlets are beginning to curl under his ears, curve against the base of his neck. It suits him more than the tight uniform cut Heaven always encouraged.

Crowley is about to return to this conversational back-and-forth, relishing the challenge, when he sees them. Sitting inside the cafe at a plastic covered side table, dressed in tan and beige over-coats, groomed hair combed over neatly. They look like the front cover of a particularly uninspired men's fashion magazine, with the overall aura that they've picked out clothes without a thought to what the ensemble looks like.

Crowley stands abruptly. The coffee sits poorly in his stomach.

“Let's go,” he says, throwing down a note to cover the drinks. His words have sharpened to a point. Aziraphale's following him standing, looking at him in askance.

“I'll...” Crowley's words have suddenly decided to bolt to a tax-haven. “I'll explain... we just... let's go back to the hotel.”

He doesn't want to plead, but he will. Aziraphale's mouth tightens into a flat line, but he mimics Crowley's quick step.

The hotel is a five minute walk away from the cafe. Crowley wants to glance around to see if they're following, but he doesn't want to panic Aziraphale. Really, he doesn't want to panic himself.

A coincidence, he thinks, they're not here for him, they're just in the neighbourhood.

He has the same confidence in this belief as he has in astrology and home-shopping channels.

He takes the stairs two at a time, and it's difficult to convince himself he's not running. Aziraphale follows, a steadier shadow, and he hasn't said anything. Crowley's unspeakably grateful. He's not sure he has the words right now.

They get to the room, and Crowley smashes the door shut so hard it deserves an apology, wrenches the chain across.

“Crowley.”

Aziraphale's face has gone hard with an unhappy confusion. His shoulders tense, he's looking at Crowley expectantly.

“We need to get out of here,” Crowley says in lieu of explaining. He's cursing himself for coming back to the room, they should have just got in the car, they should have just left. “We should... pack anything you want to take with you.”

“ _Crowley..._ ” An adamant frustration, and Crowley thinks Aziraphale is going to argue with him, and they don't have time for this.

“Aziraphale, _please_.”

Aziraphale looks at him, nods displeased and goes off into the other room.

Crowley doesn't need Aziraphale happy, he needs him _safe._

And then there's a knock at the door. Polite, two taps on wood, resounding.

There's no point in pretending he can't hear them.

Crowley takes the chain off the door and opens it. It wouldn't stop them anyway.

The two angels are standing there, looking like salesmen. They look serious but not strict. They hold themselves like they have every right in the world to be bothering them here at some three star hotel in the middle of Wales.

“Whatever you want,” Crowley hisses, “you can just sod off right now.”

It's been a long time since he's had to fight with an angel. Aziraphale was never really any good at wrestling, and preferred to make snippy comments and barbed suggestions than try and discorporate his physical body from this plane. He hopes this isn't going to work against him.

One of the angels, the taller one, with dark skin and hair shorn tight, surveys him magnanimously as though Crowley should be grateful he's not been obliterated on sight.

“We're here for the Principality Aziraphale,” they say.

“He can't come to the door right now,” Crowley says in a voice that he hopes is suitably dripping with disdain. “Leave a message and he'll get back to you.”

“He is expected to come with us to give a report in person to his superiors. He is required to answer to the charge laid against him of abandoning his post and going absent without leave.”

“ _Abandoned_?” Crowley retorts, and there's a guttural sound in his throat that is reminiscent of something with claws. He doesn't move back from the door. “You abandoned _him_. You _left him_. He owes you nothing.”

His grip on the door is beginning to tighten enough to splinter. He is trying to breathe through the rage.

“Aziraphale is a servant of Heaven,” the smaller one says, a little more tentatively. Maybe she knows that this will need a more delicate touch. “He's expected to do his duty. He will come with us. If he's done nothing wrong, he can be reassigned to a post that best fits his... his other skills.”

Crowley makes a crass exclamation that shows exactly what he thinks of that. The shorter angel gives a shocked sound and looks like she's about to cross herself. The taller angel's face twitches, and their wings billow out like sails caught in an updraught.

“We will retrieve him without your permission, demon,” they say. Everything about them, the wings, the granite assertive expression on their face is designed to be intimidating, but Crowley's faced down Aziraphale's moods and petty snits over the years which has leant him a certain immunity.

Besides, there's nothing they can threaten him with that he hasn't suffered already, not any more.

Crowley doesn't budge. If anything, his body crowds in to more effectively block the door. He wishes he had a weapon of some sort. His body assumes old habits, his stance widening, his back strung like a bow, his own wings branching out and fluttering like a shield. He makes his teeth spike longer than usual, and in a thought, his glasses have washed from his face and his slitted eyes glow malevolently.

“Crowley.”

Aziraphale's come back in the hallway. His blank face clocks the confrontation brewing up before him. Everyone turns to look at his quiet, steady interjection, and Crowley feels panic begin to leak through him like a punctured balloon.

 _They can't take him,_ he thinks, despairing. _Not now. He can't leave again._

Aziraphale strides forward with sure steps and Crowley's not sure why, but he's stepping to one side, allowing Aziraphale to stand near the threshold of the open door. He looks at the two angels with their wings out, shorter than both of them by a good head. His beady eyes assess them with a critical eye like one of his old books beginning to come down with mildew.

And then he slams the door in their face.

He whirls around as though he's trying to wash his hands of the whole thing, his expression vexed and brows knitting. Crowley's lungs have forgotten they have a job to do. But then Aziraphale stops walking away, brakes dead like he's reached a traffic light. His face has an exhibition that showcases new and emerging emotions, not all of them ones that Crowley recognises.

Crowley can't tell what he's thinking. If he'd ask, Aziraphale would have difficulty articulating exactly the morass he's waded into. He might say something about how, before, when the dust had been settling and they'd planned to have a picnic, his logic was to just lock up and leave, first thing in the morning without telling anyone where he was going. He might say something about how, looking back and having had an undesirably long amount of time to think upon it all, that whole scenario looked exactly like it really was, stealing away to avoid confrontation, hoping to run away and have no one come looking for him. Like he was guilty of some crime, like what he was doing was something shameful.

Aziraphale might say if he'd had the words that, whatever else he's felt for Crowley, he's never been ashamed of him. Ashamed of his own weakness, certainly, his own perceived failings and inadequacies, the things he's wanted that he was told no proper angel should want. But not Crowley.

Any shame has been sanded away through years of wanting and waiting, of giving up and mourning the life he never got. And now it could be his, and he is damned if someone's going to take it from him again when he's just got it back.

Aziraphale clenches his jaw, stomps back to the door and yanks it open.

The angels are still there.

“It might interest you to know,” Aziraphale declares primly, with the tone of someone who is going to write a condescendingly snide letter to the council about the state of the roads. “That I have no intention of coming back with you, period.”

The taller one raises an eyebrow.

“You cannot defy the will of Heaven...” they start with a patronising slowness, but Aziraphale interrupts.

“I can and I will,” he states firmly. “That's just how it is, I'm afraid. You are wasting your time here.”

“The _arrogance_ ,” the taller one derides expressively. “You would refuse His commands?”

“ _Your arrogance,_ ” Aziraphale snaps with a blistering indignation, a climbing pitch, “is presuming you speak for His will at all. They aren't His commands. They are yours. And I am not beholden to you.”

Aziraphale's voice is steady, glints sharp. It's the most he's spoken since he got free. Watching the conversation is a similar feeling to watching someone striking matches in a petrol station.

“Your position will be put under threat,” the smaller one urges him.

“Then fire me,” Aziraphale states bullishly, arms folded crossly. “ _No_. Better yet, best not bother. I quit.”

Even Crowley sucks in a gasp at that. The room rings with the words like a shared tinnitus. Crowley stares with a blanket of terror, half expecting Aziraphale to Fall in an agonising thunderclap of light.

Nothing happens. Aziraphale stands there, his body immovable.

“You would turn your back on Heaven?” the tall one exclaims with a shocked dismay. “After everything?”

“And what has Heaven ever allowed me that is better than what I have here on Earth?” Aziraphale questions insistently. “I have been lost for a long time. I have had a lot of time to think over my life and my mistakes, and my greatest shame is to have tried to blindly follow your will for so long. There is nothing you could possibly offer me that I don't already possess.”

“We could take you by force.”

Aziraphale doesn't unleash his wings. He doesn't need to. He looks like the lodestone of a great city, constant, unshakeable. He looks almost human, and that's enough to scare them.

“You could,” he responds placidly. “I wouldn't advise it.”

There is a silence, and no one moves. Crowley can't remember how to blink.

The angels take a step back.

“Have a good day,” Aziraphale says serenely but with a bite that wishes them anything but, and closes the door with a click of the latch.

Crowley's the one to breathe first.

“Aziraphale...” he whispers, almost dizzy. “Aziraphale, that was...”

Crowley can't continue, because Aziraphale's strode up to him, carefully grasped his arms and pushed their faces together in what someone who has never kissed before thinks the mechanism looks like.

Crowley's world loosens its shoulders, drains soft. He pushes into it, using his hands to wrap around the angel's back, mitigating the brash force into something that makes them both giddy. Crowley doesn't know whether Aziraphale is kissing him because his body has told him it's the only way he can accurately and defiantly declare his emotions right at this moment, or whether he's thought about doing this, is amenable to doing this a whole lot more. Crowley's never been quite sold on the whole sex business but kissing is a concept he can get behind. They've never talked about it, but there's time for all this, working out kinks and twists and filling in the borders of their unknown spaces with each other. They've got all the time in the world.

Breaking apart, Aziraphale looks a little star struck.

“You don't think I was a bit too short with them?” is the first thing Aziraphale finds in his mouth to say, his brow taking on a little worried wave. “I mean, I wouldn't want to appear too rude...”

Crowley can't help himself. He's laughing high and delighted, his sound varnished with fondness. He gathers Aziraphale to him in the tightest hold, his face tucked into his shoulder, feeling him whole and safe and here under his hands.

“Let's go for a drive,” Crowley says after a while. The day is still early after all. “I have something to show you.”

 

* * *

 

They drive for a couple of hours. Crowley has convinced the car to pull the top down, even though it's not that sort of car. He thinks that one of these days he'll go back to London, collect the Bentley, but that's for another time. The wind as they meander down the M4 tussles his hair, and whips Aziraphale's curls across his face so he has to keep pushing them back. Crowley still does most of the talking, but he knows that will change with time. He has hope.

He parks smoothly in the car park of a quaint village pub, flags and wooden tables and benches with red and white outdoor umbrellas. Patrons are sitting untroubled and contented, their half-full glasses warming in the mid-afternoon heat.

“This way,” Crowley says, and holds his arm out. Aziraphale takes it, tucks himself against Crowley like they're strolling around St James' again. “There's a lovely walk along this way.”

He isn't lying. Leading out of the village, there's a rock-lined duck pond, and they trail past dog-walkers and children chasing each other, half-tripping in eagerness. Further out, there's a a foot-worn path fringed with grass stalks and unruly wild-flowers. It's quiet, broken by hedgerow birds. The bushes are blooming with the developing buds of raspberries and blackberries that will ripen in weeks for the first crop of spring. Aziraphale admires the first flourish of foxgloves, the last scatterings of snowdrops and upshoots of daffodils at bunched intervals.

Finally, they come to the front gate. The house has been buffeted by the abuse of years, paint cracking, spiders-webs making the windows look smashed in. A riot of jostling plants invade the front and back gardens, but all of this is surface. The sun has caught the front of the house, and Crowley thinks of what it could look like, in time.

“Who lives here?” Aziraphale asks.

“We do,” Crowley attempts to play it cool by drawling it almost as an off-hand thought, but then he worries he's not got his point across, because he blurts out quickly. “I mean... we could. If you wanted. With me.”

Crowley's maybe panicking a bit, because he starts garbling. His desire to play it cool face-plants in frustration.

“I know it was a long time ago... and a lot, a lot's happened, for both of us. But I found those papers, and I thought... when you got back, that we could... I mean, if it's not what you wanted...”

“Oh my dear,” Aziraphale says, his voice thick. “It's perfect. Even if this wasn't here... it's.. as long as it's with you.”

Crowley flushes as red as sunburn and knows that if he speaks now, he'll make a complete idiot of himself by saying all sorts of things unbecoming of a demon.

Instead, he fumbles in his pocket. Brings out the key he's carried in the hope that one day, they'd walk over the threshold together.

“Want to see inside?” he offers with a wide grin.

Aziraphale's smile is bright and rounded like the flash of a coin.

“Of course, my dear boy,” he replies.

 

* * *

 

They'd taken an ambling wander down to the village to sit in the sunlight. They stop at _The Last Port_ and Crowley chats to the straight-laced but welcoming regulars at the bar, picking up the trails of old conversations, sorting some of them out for a pint as he orders his own wines, waving away offers of payment. Aziraphale effusively admires the owner's scarf and the tastefulness of the colours, and indulgently plays peek-a-boo with the bairn tucked into her elbow, ridiculous expressions gracing his round face. The child gurgles and flaps her pudgy arms, and tries to grab at the loose ringlets that sway within her grasp, and Crowley has to pull him away with a tutting 'You're getting her all excited, angel”.

They sip their drinks outside, and Crowley stretches out and lets the sunlight warm the back of his neck. Aziraphale waves at the villagers he recognises, and by the time they've finished, Aziraphale has mildly embroiled himself in half a dozen stories of village gossip and news pass-the-parcel.

“We'd best be getting back,” Crowley says after a while, and Aziraphale sighs and acts put out, but knocks their ankles together.

They drop by the village shop so they can get a paper for the crossword, and the owner comes out from the store-room to tell Crowley that the paint he'd asked after had finally come in. Crowley's in the midst of painting the back-bedroom. He could bully the walls to adopt a perfect shade, but really that's not the point. Aziraphale has come up the stairs to bring him a cup of tea more than once to find him fiddling with the corners and the line around the wainscotting and listened to Crowley's complaints about consistency as he flicks the splatter of paint from his pristine shirt. He'd looked fond and called him house-proud, and Crowley had reddened and spluttered and half-heartedly denied it.

They walk back down the lane to the white-washed cottage. Crowley voices his plans to sort some things in the greenhouse, wonders out loud if he should participate in the village fair this year. Aziraphale comments mock-sternly that considering how he's been causing his tomatoes to grow to twice their usual size, it would be terribly unfair. Crowley confidently thinks he'll be able to convince the angel to let him. Aziraphale's got some ingredients waiting back at the house and he's anxious to try to put them to use this afternoon. Crowley teases him with a well-worn comment that maybe it'll be edible this time, and Aziraphale puffs up and slaps his arm lightly and calls him _beastly_ , and Crowley laughs and dodges. Aziraphale might not be a natural baker, but Crowley isn't going to complain, not when he gets to eat his failed attempts. As crosses to bear, it's a rather delightful one to suffer.

“Tea?” Aziraphale asks, pushing open the varnished gate with its black painted latch. Crowley looks at the marvellous glow of the June weather, knowing the conservatory will be sweltering, a lush and verdant sauna for him to laze in, and Aziraphale amends that knowingly to: “A white wine then. I'll get one chilling.”

He goes in, bustling with the bag containing the paints and newspaper but Crowley stays outside for a minute. Looking at the apple tree he's nudged into bearing over-weighted branches worth of fruit – Aziraphale wants to try and make a crumble or a tart with the produce that's already started to litter the lawn. He admires the begonias and peonies that preen proudly in the afternoon light, the drone of bees that are lazily dipping in and out of the outcrop of larkspur and snapdragons. With a little bit of pride he can't quite shake, he thinks that he never saw Eden with this much life.

By the front porch, he unlaces his well-buffed shoes and places them almost reverently next to the scuffed brown leather brogues already precisely set down.

Then he closes the door, and as ever, goes to find Aziraphale.


End file.
